Teachers’(ings’) Tug of War: Exploring complex relationships between high stakes test accountability pressures, teaching, and student performance.
Lesley A. Rex & Matthew C. Nelson
University of Michigan
Introduction
In our work we are addressing the need for studies that elaborate the effects of national standardized testing, often high stakes, on what is being taught as English language arts in high school classrooms. We share Deborah Cameron’s view that "studying the discourse in which people communicate during a period of major social change is one way of studying change itself" (Cameron, 2001, p.129). And, that ". . . the emergence of new kinds of discourse is not only a consequence of social change, but also an instrument of social change" (Cameron, 2001, p.130) [Cameron’s emphasis]. For three years, we have been in high schools with English teachers who are making good faith efforts to prepare their students to perform well on tests while maintaining a robust curriculum, and studying how those competing agendas played out in their classrooms. Our purpose has been to see the impact of conflicted thinking about teaching and curriculum in the ways teachers talk with their students during routine instruction. We also consider how classroom talk is instantiating changes in what students are learning as English language arts.
In this paper we present a slice of our analysis from the current third stage of our study. In the first stage we described the accountability culture of the district and teachers’ frustrations and concerns about the effect of those pressures on their teaching and curriculum (Rex & Nelson, 2000). In the second stage, we described how two teachers in the district who were committed to preparing their students for the high stakes test unwittingly stymied their own test preparation objectives. They exerted accountability pressure on themselves that competed with and mostly took precedence over the accountability goals of their departments, schools, and districts (Rex & Nelson, 2001).
In the third stage, we are focusing on a tug of war that emerged in stage two analyses between professional roles teachers assumed, versions of school literacies they taught, and the student identities that were constructed. The work we are presenting in this paper focuses on classroom writing instruction. We are also in the process of analyzing related reading instruction and identity construction. We have noted that amidst the institutional urgency and demands for teachers to rewrite their curriculum and insert test preparation lessons, teachers are taking up particular roles and relationships with their administration, their colleagues, and their students. We will address how these roles are visible in the ways teachers instruct their students in writing. The following question guided this particular study: How do the demands of test preparation surface in the ways teachers position writing instruction and students as writers?
We begin with what we think our study can add to national conversations about these issues. Jolene and Stan, the two teachers who kindly volunteered their classrooms for this study, demonstrate what appear to be opposing instructional approaches to preparing students to be writers and test takers. We suggest that their positions represent two sides in a current battle for pedagogical and curricular dominance: between a discrete skills-based, rhetorical form approach and a writing process, writing workshop pedagogy. While we agree that this battle has been waged since national writing project sites began their earnest conversion of writing instructors in the mid-1970’s, our study suggests that the tide has turned, at least in the district we studied. Writing process and workshop principles are losing the political upper hand, though committed teachers continue to retain them in their practice. Political conflicts between skills-based and process-based practice play out in classrooms. The confounding effect on classroom instruction is the purpose for our presentation today—to illuminate how students are buffeted by the conflict.
Conceptual frame
Our lens for looking at English language arts instruction takes into account particular ways of conceptualizing subject matter, identity, and social relations.
Subject matter, the knowledge to be learned through the curriculum, is not constant, stable, or fixed. The language teachers and students use to talk about "subject matter" produces versions of subject matter. So messages about how to write, read, communicate, and achieve are produced in and through the language of those who act as if they and the people they are talking with know what subject matter is and is not. Subject matters are fluid, changing, and co-constructed over time in settings like classrooms where they become the local norms for knowledge and knowing carried forward into other settings (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Rex & McEachen, 1999; Rex, 2001).
Identity is shifting and multiple. Language using is an act of identity, which is not the expression of an identity that formed early in life or a natural essence. People continue to construct and reconstruct identity as they encounter each other in the classroom and out in the world. In their talk together, people position themselves as a particular person and are positioned as a certain person by the other. These positionings develop into patterns that become the identities people "do" (Gee, 1996); Rex, 2000, 2001).
Social relationships are continually built, rebuilt, and transformed. Through discourse practices people assert who they think they are, or want to be, and distinguish themselves from, or connect themselves to, others. Their social relationships provide and withhold status, include and exclude people, validate and reject knowledge. Social discourses reflect the cultures and social circumstances people have experienced, which influence the words they choose, the values they reflect, and the agendas they are promoting. In some situations some discourses have more social value than others and thus bring more social goods (Gee, 1996; Fairclough, 1989, 1995).
These concepts work together to provide this study with a particular view of classroom teaching and learning. This lens, a dynamic, inter-relationship between subject matter knowledge-building, identity construction, and social positioning, makes it impossible for us to view one without taking into consideration the others. To understand in any given situation how students come to perform literately and how particular pedagogical and curricular moves affect their performance, requires understanding these activities as social acts among social actors within an evolving classroom culture. These social acts are situated, in-the-moment negotiations of social positioning that reflect the dispositions, values, beliefs, and inclinations of those doing the negotiating. As they negotiate social position, teachers’ and students’ values speak through them. And because they do not all share the same life and educational experiences, and have not all acquired the same knowledge and ways of thinking, difference is construed as a struggle for dominance, and hence each classroom is a site for negotiating status. Everyone wants to be in the powerful position of having their ideas, their ways of doing things acknowledged as legitimate. At the end of a semester, a school year, a lifetime of power negotiation, certain ways of thinking, acting, and being have won the high ground. And the others have had to fall back to a lesser position.
Methods
Contextualizing the study
The district
At the time of our study, an intense debate about the district’s scores on the state’s standardized test was ongoing. The district’s scores on the state assessment were low compared to the scores of adjoining, similarly resourced districts. Public officials and journalists expressed displeasure over student performance on the test and a tense situation in the community developed. In response to the calls for higher test scores, the district instituted a professional development program that was designed to prepare teachers to incorporate the style of test items from the state assessment with the subject matter they were teaching in their classes. Teachers were given release time to participate in a two-day, district-wide workshop, and several of the scheduled professional development days were devoted to creating "test-like" assessments. The district also ordered test preparation workbooks. Although the English teachers in the district were not required to use the books, they were encouraged to do so. The year classroom data was collected, the teachers were meeting regularly to design test-like curriculum for their classrooms.
The teachers
The two teacher participants in this study, Stan and Jolene, were both in their third year of teaching high school, and each had spent their high school teaching career in the same school. Jolene, a European American woman, began her career teaching both social studies and English at the school. Although she was a relative newcomer to the profession, Jolene had taken an active role in the department. She contributed regularly to departmental discussions and she was asked to lead one session of the district-wide professional development seminar concerned with incorporating state assessments and class content. Jolene had not participated in the local affiliate of the National Writing Project as had some of her colleagues, although she did talk with other teachers frequently about pedagogical issues. Based on our interviews, we can say that Jolene liked teaching, felt she had been prepared well, and took pride in the job she did as a teacher.
While Stan, a European American man, was also in his third year of teaching high school, he had over a decade of experience teaching composition at a university. The summer before we entered his classroom, Stan had participated in the local writing project; he told us that it had been a powerful experience for him and that he was looking forward to incorporating what he had experienced into his class. Like Jolene, Stan was an active participant in his school’s English department—he saw himself as a "team player." He was asked to lead a professional development workshop on "voice" in student writing, particularly as it related to the requirements for the state assessment. This was a topic that was important to Stan. He told us in interviews that he thought that the state assessment tested important things, but that these things should be taught in the context of preparing students to become "real writers."
The classrooms
The one European American and fifteen African American students in Jolene’s class were all honors students. Their school records indicated that they had maintained high scores on standardized English tests and had earned exemplary grades in English language arts since first entering school. Observations and interviews with the students indicated that all but one of the students was motivated to do well in the class and aspired to earning a good gpa and going to college. Students made effective use of class time and kept to established time deadlines. They were confident readers and writers and fluently produced standard written English with errors within the expected range for eleventh grade students.
We see a very different picture in Stan’s class of twenty-three general students. Although similar in racial make up, all but two students in the class were African-American, the students in Stan’s class demonstrated a pattern of low school achievement. Their transcripts revealed, particularly after kindergarten and first grade, a lack of success in English language arts, as well as in other subjects. In both their scores on standardized tests and their grades and comments from teachers, the students routinely performed below grade level, and below the level of their fellow classmates. Stan was aware of these students’ schooling histories and made curricular choices designed to allow these students to experience success early in the class with the hope of giving them confidence to tackle more difficult challenges as the class progressed. Observations and interviews with students showed a wide range of interest and motivation. A few students were eager to do well and considered the class work helpful. Others felt overwhelmed by life or social pressures and attended or performed intermittently. Some acted out and did little work when they attended. The writing produced by all except two or three students exhibited grammatical flaws consistent with AAVE or English as a second language and consistent struggles with fluency.
Data collection
As ethnographers, we took up residence in district and school communities so that we could meaningfully relate classroom practices to the cultures in which they were embedded. Our extended presence allowed us to develop relationships with key individuals and become members of various groups over several years, so that answers to our questions deepened and extended. By the time our study focused on the practices in specific classrooms, we had established a knowledge base and relationships with key informants that would contextually enrich the meaning we derived by asking questions specific to classroom teaching. Stan and Jolene volunteered their classrooms to let us see how they were preparing students for the test. We videotaped daily in each classroom for eight weeks, collected student writing, read all the students’ school files, interviewed the teachers and students, and took extensive field notes. The questions guiding the collection of classroom data asked: What counts as literate knowledge in this classroom? How is literate knowledge constructed? How does the teacher plan/re-plan and enact curriculum? How do students take up the curriculum? What does the curriculum become and how does it evolve? How does the teacher conduct instruction? How do students respond to instructional approaches? What are the classroom norms for being literate and performing literately? What counts as literate language arts achievement? What is important and expected for students’ literate performance?
Data analysis
After data were collected for this study, we undertook two levels of analysis to determine what counted as writing and being a writer in the two classrooms? We evolved three, more specific, questions as analysis commenced: Whose rules for writing count in this classroom, and when? Which language for writing counts, and how? What counts as being a writer?
Defining discourse as "language-in-use," first, from video and field note sources, we mapped all discursive events in each classroom (Bloome & Bailey, 1992; Bloome & Egan-Roberson, 1993), then rhetorically and thematically analyzed student written work and all interview transcripts. We shaped assertions that emerged from this rhetorical and thematic analysis as we pursued confirming and disconfirming evidence (Erickson, 1986). The maps represented the chronological flow of what was talked about, who was talking, and what was being constructed as academic knowledge and social structures. The maps and analyses of student work and interviews served as a context for the second level of transcription and analysis. We selected telling (Mitchell, 1984) classroom interactions throughout the semester that were rich sites for exploring construction of writing and writers. These interactions were selected from classroom events that first stage analyses indicated were meaningfully important to class members, that the data suggest were key moments of negotiation within typical discursive practices, and that marked a trajectory of over-time construction.
Results: Constructing writing and the writer
In the next two sections, we present instructional segments from Jolene and Stan’s classrooms. We selected these two segments because they surface the contested issues we observed throughout our data.
Jolene and John
In the following in-the-moment interaction from Jolene’s class we observe the construction of what counts as essay writing as Jolene confers with John about the penultimate draft of his paper. We want to make visible what we observe as a tug of war between two sources of Jolene’s instruction—what she believes is necessary instruction in the local context of working with John, her student writer; and, what she believes is necessary as influenced by departmental guidelines for instruction. The interaction between Jolene and John demonstrates how these two sources play out in shaping the kind of language students will use in their written work and the way that they will be seen as writers.
The following interaction took place near the end of the school year, and occurred at Jolene’s desk in the front of the classroom. In this conversation, Jolene implores John to "think of a better way to say that" because he’s "a better writer than that" (5), while John struggles to make sense of Jolene’s comments and resist her prescriptions for improvement.
In this tug of war over a student’s writing, Jolene focuses on the wording of John’s work, a critique which John at first mistakes for criticism of his ideas. Jolene is firmly in control of this interaction, a conversation which she begins by outlining problems she sees in John’s paper in a rapid-fire manner. John’s objections to the interaction come when he thinks Jolene is questioning his use of blindness as a unifying concept for his essay. Eventually he wonders if Jolene wants him to "rearrange the words" (11). Jolene shows him what she wants by rewriting the sentence for John, incorporating vocabulary, specifically the word prevalent, with which John is unfamiliar (12). John’s indication that he does not know what prevalent means leads Jolene to go beyond a discussion of the wording of this particular sentence to remind John what themes are. Jolene picks up on John’s use of the word using as an indication that he misunderstands how themes work in literature. In Jolene’s spur of the moment explanation, that "the author uses the theme, you’re not doing that" (14), she may be intentionally invoking John’s word, uses, to indicate that authors create themes, not student essay writers. Her response, which implies that authors intentionally put themes in their writing, could be somewhat misleading. In the pressure of the moment, she may be unable to articulate the concept clearly and fully that themes are constructed by readers and emerge through reading texts. Or, it may be the case that Jolene is not entirely clear as to how themes emerge from texts. We are unable to determine which of these may be the better interpretation because Jolene is interrupted by a classroom disruption (15). When she returns to her conversation with John, she switches topic to his concluding paragraph. This interchange demonstrates Jolene’s recognition of, and response to, a local teaching moment with John. She assesses his learning needs and responds as she sees appropriate.
Later Jolene rearranges John’s opening paragraph by physically marking the changes on John’s paper and pronouncing the text, once changes are made, "good" (23). Jolene’s control of the physical text and of the conversation about the text underscores her authoritative position in this tug of war over student language.
From our classroom observations and interviews, we know John to be a polite, soft spoken, serious inquirer, who thinks deeply about issues raised in the literature the class is reading. Often during class discussions he asks challenging questions or presents intellectually interesting and often off-beat points, which the class respects. He places interest in ideas and being a responsible citizen of the class before earning a good grade. In this conversation about his essay, John’s manner in the class is evident. He listens carefully to his teacher’s evaluative comments, attempts to understand what she is asking of him, and offers no protest. In the face of Jolene’s insistent directives, he quietly inquires to clarify what she means. He seeks information about the quality of his ideas, but acquiesces to his teacher’s focal interest—how they should be expressed.
In comparison to Jolene’s use of a local teachable moment informed by her running assessment of John’s performance is what comes next in the conversation. After the break in which Jolene admonishes the class to be quiet, Jolene invokes the school norm for introductory paragaphs as the reason for her directive that "the thesis is the last sentence of the first paragraph" (25). When John questions this rule, Jolene asserts that all English teachers at the school should be following it. In saying this Jolene aligns herself with "official" departmental practices, and adds authority to her directives by positioning them as the accepted way to be teaching essay writing. Jolene had been a leader in the district-wide, all-day inservice on how teachers could merge their current classroom English curriculum with test-like curriculum and assessments similar to their state’s standardized test. As a new teacher in the school, she had aligned herself with the teacher-leaders in her English department. She had taken up their approach for aligning all district high school English teachers’ curricula to address the need to raise student test scores.
When Jolene says, "That’s the way most of your English teachers here should be doing it. If they’re not, I, I don’t know what to tell you" (27), she makes a particular kind of complex and powerful pedagogical move to establish her position with John in relation to his past experience with other teachers. She adds authority to her role as teacher; she acknowledges that his other teachers may not have been doing what they should have been. This move allows John to save face as a good student by acknowledging that his prior teachers, not he, may be to blame for his not knowing this way of writing.
After providing John with authentic, individualized, in-the-moment, contextualized essay writing instruction, this pedagogical move brings the tug of war extant in Jolene’s English department into her instruction. External curricular demands for what counts as student performance contest with targeted instruction. Her statements to John surface an acknowledgment that some teachers may follow the norms that Jolene has accepted and others may not. Jolene acknowledges that differences in teachers’ acceptance of the district’s curriculum goals are a site of potential conflict both within the faculty of the school and between students and teachers who may not be working from the same set of beliefs about literacy.
The politics of the department over the preparation of students for the state standardized test, and their own curricular positions are being brought to bear in this moment of classroom instruction. We spent a year and a half in this school, participating in departmental meetings, district workshops, and numerous one-on-one conversations with teachers. We saw conflict in the department on several fronts. We saw a significant pedagogical difference between teachers who had participated in the area writing project and those who had not. The teachers who had attended the writing project seemed to focus their pedagogy on getting students to write about things that affected them personally, to use their experiences as the starting point for engagement in writing. The teachers in the department who had not experienced the writing project had a different approach to pedagogy—an approach that favored teaching discrete basic skills.
Furthermore, ongoing, often divisive, issues at the district level affected the political climate within which Jolene taught. Declining student scores on the state-wide standardized test led to a district mandate that the scores be improved. This pressure led to curricular changes and blame-shifting throughout the district. In Jolene’s school, a rift occurred in the English department that placed many of the English teachers in opposition to the school’s reading teachers. The reading teachers believed a curriculum which focused on "the basics" was needed to improve student performance on the state assessment. This view was in conflict with other teachers, especially those who had participated in the writing project, who thought that expressive rather than prescriptive curriculum was the way to prepare students to perform on the test and in their lives after graduation.
These swirling conflicts between teachers in the school and throughout the district shaped the context within which Jolene taught. These tensions were heightened for Jolene, in only her third year of teaching, as she attempted to negotiate the political issues that were central to her pedagogical practices. In this interaction, she tells John that there is a way "your English teachers here should be doing it" (27), while also acknowledging that some of the teachers may resist. Jolene chooses to align herself with the authority of a group of her colleagues who have decided how "it" should be done. By doing so, she can rely on the authority of the group in defense of her literacy rules, rather than presenting them as hers alone. In this moment, Jolene makes a particular kind of sense of her political position within the intense debates surrounding her by identifying herself with this group, however fragmented it may seem.
Stan and his class
The following excerpt from Stan’s classroom provides a contrasting view of how students’ writing is shaped along with their identities as writers as a teacher responds to a local "teachable moment." In the classroom interaction leading up to this segment, Stan had one of the students read aloud a passage from Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which the class was reading. The passage Stan chose is a long paragraph, consisting of multiple clauses connected by the word and, containing no terminal punctuation marks. Stan comments on the length of the sentence, and a student asserts that his previous English teachers would not have allowed students to write that kind of sentence. Other students agree, and Stan takes up the opportunity to teach what he thinks is important about writing.
[Uh-uh
In this segment of classroom conversation, we see a tug of war between the rules for writing students have received from other teachers, and the approach to writing and being a writer Stan is offering. By saying, "Mr. Hemingway does it. So, I guess you could do it too" (43), Stan draws a distinction between the rules for writing illustrated by A Farewell to Arms, and those of the students’ other English teachers. Jane contests. Her previous teacher would not allow students to write in the way Hemingway does. She underscores this by saying he would "off the pages" (35), and mark them with a big "X" (38), while making a dramatic X gesture with her arms. The rules Jane learned in previous English classes resonate deeply. Other students agree. They, too, received either real "X’s" on their writing or marks with similarly deep resonance, and those experiences frame how they approach writing in Stan’s class.
By saying, "Well, Mr. Hemingway does it," Stan positions himself with "real writers" and positions students to question their former writing instruction. In the rest of the interchange, Stan asserts a view of writing for everyday life in the students’ world, in which they emulate "real writers" and choose the rules they will follow. He projects writing as liberating rather than restrictive, and context-bound rather than arbitrary. This is a message his students are willing to hear. Years of not measuring up to the rules for writing their teachers laid down, predispose them to prefer an approach which contests the rules.
Stan seizes this unplanned opportunity to reinforce and build upon students’ willingness to view writing his way. He breaks away from talking about A Farewell to Arms and asks students to name other writing "rules" they had heard from their other English teachers. As students call them out, Stan writes them on the board.
No "ands" or "buts" or "because" to start a sentence
5 paragraphs
No "I" or "you"
Thesis is last sentence of the 1st paragraph
One topic sentence for each paragraph
No contractions
As Jane indicated earlier, these low achieving writers know the rules of school writing, but have difficulties operationalizing them. The gap is wide between knowing what they are supposed to do and how to accomplish it—the critical distinction Ryle (1949) long ago made between knowing that and knowing how. This gap is the apparent source of their frustration and discontent.
In his next gesture, Stan dramatically positions himself as the antithesis of the rule-making teacher. In doing so he separates himself from all their other teachers, and hopes to separate them from their frustrating experiences with writing. Stan appropriates the X that served as such a powerful symbol for Jane and the other students, theatrically crosses out the rules on the board, and symbolically nullifies the rules the students have learned, stating ". . . the simple fact is that none of these are rules" (47).
Student responses to Stan’s claim are mixed. One girl interprets Stan’s point as these are simply the teachers’ own rules, not THE rules of writing, which Stan’s dramatic shrug confirms. Mary expresses this new awareness with "Oh, wow." However, other students remain wary of this new approach. It is a student who introduces the serpent in the Eden of no rules writing. "There are rules on the [state standardized test]" (52). He is referring to the test all the students know they will have to take that year, which teachers are supposed to be preparing them for. Students who score well on the test receive a "merit scholarship" ($1,500 in-state and $2500 out-of-state) and students who pass the exam receive that designation on their diplomas. That many of the students laugh at Robert’s serious comment indicates their agreement with Robert’s point and their appreciation that he "got" Stan. Their unpleasant reminder of reality is ameliorated when the authority figure is bested by one of their own. For most of them, this will be the third time they have taken the test, and they assume it will probably be the third time they score poorly. Another big X on their writing record. This turn in the class conversation is not where Stan wanted to go. He finds his footing and reasserts his position. Even on the [state standardized test] there are "no hard, fast rules" (54).
In the midst of building a new perspective on writing in this classroom, state testing is introduced, and by students who are least likely to perform well on those tests. In this encounter and in others we observed, Stan’s students did not indicate they expected him to teach them how to operationalize those rules. Rather, they revealed how they see themselves as inevitably similarly positioned by school writing and by testing. They believed they would continue to fall short of meeting the requirements of those rules. Stan’s response was to ignore the allusion to the test and return to his argument that "sometimes good writers don’t use that stuff up there" (59) (the rules list on the board). Stan presented a view of writing rules that was more flexible, more dependent on the rhetorical genre and audience. "It depends on what you are writing." Stan asked students to think about possible writing situations and to use what they know about what is and is not appropriate in those situations to determine which "rules" to follow. Stan also moved beyond school and test writing in this section to invoke "real writing"—that is, writing in the world students inhabit outside of school. This is a world in which they might write a love letter, and not in five paragraphs. This move is consistent with Stan’s goals for the course, which he communicated to us and the students repeatedly: Stan wants students to become "real writers" who write about things they care about in ways that express their own voices and communicate to intended audiences. He wants them to take charge of the rules. He believes that if they do, they will also be able to write well on the tests.
For the moment, by offering the published, prestigious Hemingway as evidence and contrasting his approach with their previous restrictive school-rule-bound writing, Stan wins many of his students to his side in the conflict between their received views of writing and his own. A student comments and others concur that they "like this class" (55-57).
As one of the eleventh grade teachers who have been working diligently to reshape their curriculum and writing instruction, Stan has been a generous team player. Yet in these instructional moments, we observe what happens when his philosophy of teaching writing and an opportunity to motivate students takes precedence over efforts in the department to align test preparation approaches. In Stan’s classroom we observe not only explicit tug of war tensions between him and his students, but also between his own and his colleagues’ curriculum, and between writing for the state standardized test and for the "real world."
Discussion
The ways teachers position themselves during classroom instructional discourse reflect particular roles and relationships they assume with their colleagues and their departmental curriculum. Stan and Jolene’s roles seem to be in opposition, as do their instructional practices. Jolene positioned herself as a member of her English department and her instruction as representative of departmental curriculum. Stan, as the representative of writing that transcends departmental curriculum, positioned himself as separate from his fellow English teachers. The teachers’ descriptions of their relationships with their fellow teachers during our interviews suggest these two assertions are overgeneralized. Jolene reported she had important differences with some members of her department, and Stan characterized himself as a team player who wanted to work with his department colleagues. Yet, when we observed their classroom discourse, a more pervasive position dominated. While Jolene and Stan may have a more complex intellectual position about their instruction, their discourses throughout their eight weeks of instruction indicate they enact a more unified position in their classrooms.
The implications of this finding emerge when we look at five main differences in how Jolene and Stan talked to their students about writing. They remind us that even when departments make urgent efforts to align curriculum toward successful test performance, students receive unique, and possibly conflicting, instruction. Moving from classroom to classroom, students can receive conflicting messages about:
In Stan’s classroom, students would be directed to downplay the authority of a reified set of rules for writing they acquired in prior classrooms. With Jolene, they would be held to rules bearing the authority of a presumed departmental curriculum. While Hemingway, as a "real writer," and the genres of writing for real-life situations evidence Stan’s authority for dismissing school rules, departmental legitimacy empowers Jolene’s.
These divergent sources of legitimacy position students differently as writers, and privilege different sources of their authorial authority. John who we would argue is already a "real writer," in the sense that he is concerned with saying what he means so as to clearly communicate to his reader, is positioned to think differently about how he should be thinking of what constitutes being an effective writer. He is to be concerned with form, but not as it assists the development and communication of his ideas. He is to assess his writing on the basis of how well his ideas fit into the official essay form. John takes his authority for his writing, then, from how well it matches departmental expectations. Conversely, form emerges from the writing situation in Stan’s class. His students are to think of themselves as the ones who should decide which rules to follow to be an effective writer. The X-ing out of official rules shifts the authority for rule making to the students. If rules only become rules when they suit a particular rhetorical situation, then students must originate them or derive them from somewhere.
Different functions for language are being communicated in the two classrooms. Jolene’s directive to John to remove personal pronouns and substitute the word, prevalent , conveys a view of language as a tool for effective presentation. John is urged to find a better way to say things. John’s ideas, though they could be shaky, are accepted as fine; how his language represents them is the focus of the feedback. When Stan’s students read Hemingway’s rule-busting use of "and," in a bona fide run-on sentence if they were to use it in their school writing, they are being told a different story about how writers use language. Language is meant to be used to create an effect. Language is a tool for writers to increase the power of communication.
Where the rules for writing reside, the student writers’ authority, and the function of language are fundamental principles in alignment with the instruction the teachers provide and with their role in giving the instruction. Jolene bears the authority of her department in molding John’s essay language and form to suit departmental objectives for writing instruction in preparation for the test. Her instruction reflects an integrity, a logical relationship, among the three principles and her pedagogical role that is driven by the authority of test preparation. Stan’s role of dispersing the authority enjoyed by real writers to his students reflects a similar internal integrity and reasoning that resists test preparation as a driving force for writing instruction.
These oppositional positions logically extend to locating blame for inadequate student performances. Jolene provides a face-saving out for John by blaming former English teachers who may not have followed the departmental guidelines for teaching essay writing. And Stan’s dramatic X directly implies that his students’ former teachers were remiss in not teaching them how "real writers" write. That is why they are having so much trouble with those rules.
How should we read the opposition of these two powerful instructional approaches and their effects on student literacy learning? We suggest that they represent the battle between a discrete skills-based, rhetorical form approach that dominated writing until the late 1960’s and approaches to writing instruction forwarded over the last thirty years. The emergence of composition as its own field of scholarship, including studies’ of novice-expert writers, writing process and classroom research, evolved into writing workshop pedagogy. This approach pioneered in seminal work by Donald Graves (1983), Nancy Atwell (1987), and Lucy Calkins (1986) has prevailed in English teacher education and inservice professional development, as disseminated through the National Writing Projects, which are still active after more than 25 years. Stan’s professional background as a composition instructor can be read as a map of these composition influences.
On the other hand, even if Jolene experienced that model in her preservice teacher education, it is not represented in her teaching. Those influences have been superceded by the political pressures of test preparation and her alignment with a competing model of instruction.
Our ethnographic data from the district and at the two high schools indicate that the battle between these two positions has been intense over these last three years and the view represented by Stan’s position is losing ground in the institutional structure. A new assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum replaced her predecessor, who had aggressively situated writing project English teachers as district professional development leaders . The new assistant superintendent has publicly called for a test-driven back-to-the-basics approach for English curriculum. In a series of moves to forward her position, she has dismissed the English education coordinator, who was a writing project co-director and nationally board certified English language arts teacher. Concurrently, the influential writing project English teachers in the district, some of whom were department chairs and reading specialists, have found themselves in the midst of sometimes vitriolic attacks as their departments organize to write test preparation curriculum. Department morale is low and social atmospheres are tense. Teachers are forming like-minded alliances in defensive subgroups.
Within this political and social culture, classroom instruction continues. As Jolene, Stan, and their students have helped us illustrate, when teachers take their professional responsibilities seriously in this divisive political tug of war, inevitably their students are the recipients of the fallout.
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