Saving English Studies education: Teachers at the center

[My apologies for being so long away - nearly a month! Hopefully this post will explain some of what I've been up to.]

Starting with the fall 2008 presidential election, we've heard a lot about the need for education reform in this country. I certainly see some major hurdles ahead for the future of English education, at the elementary, high school, and college/university level. But I'm convinced that we don't need another national initiative to overhaul our school systems. Instead, what we need to do is change the way we teach teachers to teach.

As Assistant Director of Composition at a four-year university, the majority of my administrative work requires me to work with English teachers on their teaching. I observe adjunct faculty teaching first-year writing at the university, collaborate with these and tenure-line faculty to plan and revise writing curriculum, and design workshops for our writing faculty. I also work with secondary instructors who teach advanced placement English courses students can take in our area high schools to bypass one semester of first-year writing. This is the work I love to do. It's what I cut my teeth on at my alma mater, SIU, as an Instructional Assistant mentoring, observing, and training new graduate assistants (the ranks of the unprepared, underpaid writing teachers common to most research institutions in the US).

But I haven't enjoyed the success I wanted in this position because I haven't put teachers at the center. I suppose it goes back to my training (or lack thereof) in teaching writing: I took a graduate-level pedagogy course wherein a wonderfully knowledgeable professor told me what to do; I was observed by a more experienced graduate assistant who told me what (not) to do; I read comp theory and literary criticism, took classes in the history and theory of rhetoric, all of which assumed that I, despite an ever-growing classroom experience to draw upon, had nothing to bring to the conversation. What could a teacher possibly have to teach anyone else about teaching?

In my early teaching days, I remember camping out on Friday nights in my crowded, cluttered communal office with at least eight other GAs talking about what we were doing in our first-year writing classes that next week. We'd Xerox somebody's super-cool worksheet on untangling fused sentences, or design assignments that couldn't be easily plagiarised off the Internet, or come up with discussion questions to get students beyond the surface of Malcolm X's "Homemade Education." I learned a great deal in my pedagogy course and from my GA mentor, don't mistake me. But I learned more in these informal late-night "survival sessions," as my friend Katie called them, because instead of somebody telling me what to do, I was talking with other teachers about what worked, what didn't, what might work, and why it might be good for some students but not others.

Once I became the Instructional Assistant, though, and certainly once I was touched by the magic academic wand and became an Assistant Professor With a PhD, I was suddenly seen (even by myself) as the only one in the room with something to offer. I was convinced that my job was to bestow my knowledge and experience upon other teachers, most of whom didn't share my PhD and therefore couldn't have much worthwhile to say on the subject of teaching (even if they'd been in front of a classroom since before I started junior high).

The result? A lot of fed-up teachers who don't see the point in my so-called "workshops" 0 and rightfully so, since they probably have two excellent ideas for my every adequate one. Unfortunately, I never asked them to share these, so all anybody got to hear was me.

Luckily, I've learned my lesson, and I have some ideas for next year to ensure that I respect - and draw upon - what the wonderful teachers I'm so fortunate to work with can teach me and everyone else about the art of teaching writing. More importantly, I've decided to take my mission to the masses: I'm working to organize a National Writing Project site at my university.

The NWP is all about teachers teaching each other, at inservice programs and summer institutes; it's the bedrock of the program, beautifully articulated by James Gray in Teachers at the Center: "There were great classroom teachers in the schools who knew how to teach writing; they knew what they were doing and why they were doing it...and...they would teach one another their best practices. In the process, they would learn how to teach other teachers and then go out and do it. It would be a teacher-centered model" (35).

We hear a lot of bemoaning these days about the state of education in the US. I've been guilty of the "blame game": Our college writing classes could be more effective if high school teachers just did a better job preparing students; our high school teachers don't do a good job because our education programs in college aren't preparing people to teach writing. It's easy to place blame. It's a lot harder - yet far more worthwhile - to tackle the problem head-on, to say that teaching is not a solitary game where every teacher is alone in her/his classroom, trying desperately to keep her/his above water - or enjoying phenomenonal successes no one else ever knows about or can replicate. Rather, teaching is a communal venture that puts successful teachers in charge of teaching other teachers.

In this teacher-centered model, our classroom experiences are the foundation for better teaching - not by prescribing how other people should teach, but by interrogating our practices, considering why they work for our students (and why they might not work for others), and offering those successful strategies to other teachers who can try them out and report back on their successes (and failures). I believe that if we want to really improve education in this country, especially the teaching of reading and writing, then we have to put teachers back at the center, where they've too often been shoved aside by concerns about high-stakes testing, remedial education, and standard curricula.

Students are the heart of a classroom, no doubt. But teachers must be at the center - of curriculum development, of teacher education, and of education reform. No Child Left Behind and other well-intentioned movements have made the fatal error of casting teachers aside. I'm not saying we should all be left alone to do as we please in our classrooms. Quite the contrary. I'm saying if we really want a dynamic, innovative English Studies curriculum at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels - the kind of curriculum that will keep our students at the forefront of language and learning - then we have to put teachers in charge of what gets taught and support those efforts with meaningful, collaborative, local ventures that bring together the wonderfully creative, student-centered pedagogies that already exist.