something I am passionate about

What do you feel passionate about: write about it

I went to Leeds University in the mid-80’s to do my PGCE in Sociology and English. I loved studying there. I think they must be one of the teacher training departments that the government  felt most bothered about. Not because of the standards they achieved.

My PGCE has had a profound impact on me.

In two ways

Firstly - all my lecturers were out and out left wing progressive Marxist. I have this impression of an entire year of lectures all of which were focussed on a single subject elaborated upon in extraordinary detail  - the education system served to effectively filter people according to race, gender and class. In was an inherently unequal system that served the interests of capital. We had a lecturer who once offered a different slant. He went through all the arguments that analysed discriminatory processes and ridiculed them.   He was a lively lecture, witty and entertaining. But his message was clear and chilling. We discussed it afterwards in seminars: if all these social explanations for inequality were unsound, the argument he was for was one that established the educational order as natural as the outcome of intelligence. Middle class, male and white students did better because they were more suited to academic education.  But he was a one voice and one we rejected. Everyone else elaborated on variations on the theme education, sociology and inequality.  I can’t quite remember the Sociology team but I do remember the English teaching team and they were great.  But I was happily indoctrinated by Leeds University and year later, I thank them for it.

I was one of two black girls on the course. I meet at Leeds (not at the University, in Chapeltown in a night club – the first person who was black and doing a PhD). It did not occur to me in those days that I would be even remotely capable of a PhD. At the time probably wasn’t.

Secondly – years later, this passion for, commitment to, insistence upon equality – continues to saturate me. This is what I am and it is what I do.  I qualified to teach in secondary schools but after spending 3 months in a school (on the PGCE course) I left because I realised these were not the relationships that I wanted to have with young people.  Having chanced upon adult education, I stayed because I loved it. The looseness of it. The informality of the teacher – student relationship. Boundaries are different in community education. Professionalism is defined in other ways. In community ed there is a commitment to equality. I liked the fact the students could join management committees and be members.  The commitment to equality was translated into practice: praxis in community education. I felt as a young strutting 20 something year old black girl, and a teacher that I was undermining the education system. There were several, but particularly, there were two black guys in my first cohort of students. They had just left school and joined the local adult education institute to take GCSE English and Sociology having failed a year earlier. They passed. I liked the fact that having failed after 10 years of schooling, they were able to pass after a year n adult ed. I guess with a bit more experience, it was not as simple as school = bad and discriminatory, adult ed = good and committed to equality. I loved being a teacher, the black girl and going out blusing in the evenings, I’d bump into my students who seemed pleased and surprised that I was part of my community. This is another line of narrative – but the Leeds was the first time I’d felt part of a black community. I loved it.

So now – some years later – what do I feel passionate about?

Well, thanks to the formative influence of Leeds University – equality is still my passion. I want to create change through the work that I do: through my teaching, through my writing, through the systems and structures I establish.

I’d forgotten this.

It’s important that I return to this and remember it. It’s my passion. Without it what I do has little meaning. The gratification that rewards what I do is constantly deferred. And what happens to a dream deferred?

More than deferred. It is made irrelevant.

I have recently started reading a colleague whose work I have read before Taylor-Webb, he writes these impassioned essays about teacher knowledge, the choreography of accountability, the anatomy of accountability. He writes about the performativity culture in schools and its impact on teachers.

I am most interested here in his ideas – these I recall at a distance and now loop back to connect to my research – on the reterritorialisation of teacher knowledge.  Asking and answering the question – what happens when teaching is made teacher-proof. What happens when teachers’ knowledge is made irrelevant. When teachers ‘deliver ‘ the commodity knowledge  that have been created elsewhere, by someone else.

He refers to this as epistemic suicide.

What happens when the dream of equality is constantly deferred? 

This is the opening quote from a paper I am now writing.

doesn’t always fit in. It’s great theory; it’s good. You know, we’ve talked about how to contextualise it and the wheel, all of that.  It was very refreshing. But my [manager], all she’s interested in is, ‘Oh! He failed. Can we get him back in?’ Not, ‘Can we develop this individual?’ ‘Can we get him back in? What do you think he failed on?’ And that’s the environment we’re in. And with the contracts coming up for renewal.           

It’s very target driven, when you are in a target driven environment professional judgement goes out the window, it suffers, because, that’s the main critique of my teaching, it’s not an excuse, it’s a business. They want more for less. It’s stressful; they are asking you for what you can’t deliver. It’s terribly stressful. I’ve had 10 years of it and I’m burnt out from it.  10 years.  It’s too long for this environment.  It’s too long. You should probably have a shelf life of 5 years.

I worked with this quote as an early example of some of the ideas trainees have in reference to their teaching. But I was asking the data one question while ignoring that it  was telling me something  else – ignoring it because this was not the question I was asking.

This student is clearly unhappy in his work. Clearly unhappy with teaching and clearly feels that the professional frame that surrounds him, what he is required to do – has no meaning for him. Worse still, has a meaning that undermines is sense of who he is and what he is meant to be doing,

He finds what he is learning refreshing – but this is made stale by the voice of his manager. 

He is asked to critique his teaching – his main critique is the environment the works in and the limitations that this imposes.

Situational analysis – I think – invites us to analyse situations to explore our themes. This implies a more open ended data analysis, rather than one that focuses exclusively on our concern but one that reads the situation. I may have an interest in conceptions of literacy, but may find that my answer lies in first of all analysing the situation in its entirety and reading the data in the first instance at face value.

I have chosen to answer my question I passing That is I am asking – not the direct question : what do you think of literacy, but in passing, what conception of literacy emerges in the course of this programme.

Everybody quotes Silverman – so I will maintain the tradition. This is just a nodded acknowledgement rather than detailed referencing. There are some narratives of methodology that I love and will refer to in another blog.  What I am thinking of here is the idea that if you ask a direct question, for example, if you ask about a culture directly you get everything included in our answer; its like asking fish what water is like. The answer offers little insight. Instead, put your hand in the water, compare it to land, send a dog or cat into the water. Heat the water up or cool it down. Add things to it. Or at least, invite the fish to tell you about his life in the water - what she can and can’t do.

And so in the quote about Joseph,   my trainee teacher,  provides an example of the epistemic suicide, the dis/connected ventriloquised self that teachers experience. This sense that there values are not even allowed full articulation. What does it mean to describe yourself as a holistic teacher? How do you in the context of a literacy class develop the whole person? What aspects of your professional judgement go flying out of the window?  What would your teaching be like if theory was able to fit the possibilities of practice? There is a sense of potentiality being stalled before it has tine to flourish. There is hankering, desire but no space to explore, embed and develop.

it’s not an excuse, it’s a business.

What strikes me here – is the professional cul-de-sac that Joseph seems to inhabit.  The trouble is there may be critiques of his teaching – even within he realms of a target driven culture – but the all pervasiveness of the context obscures the possibility of him seeing this.

So – with the desire to push the boundaries of my thinking, to cover new terrain – the ideas to further explore.

Taylor-Webb on teacher knowledge and epistemic suicide

The data may answer a question that wasn't actually asked, allow yourself to read the data in ways that enable it to speak to you – open up different explorations

Sometimes a question asked in passing is more valuable than a direct question: there is little to gain form asking a fish to analyse water 

Where and how and is there any point in creating space for teachers to explore their values and reasons for teaching, if these values are unlikely to find institutional expression

I like this image, I know too little about it.

Maeve Rendle, Blackpool: Rendle takes the inspiration for this, her first solo show, from a line in Marcel Proust's reflection on the nature of memory, In Search of Lost Time: 'I could not help being saddened by the fact that there was now nothing left of my former frame of mind.' Her series of installations is on show at the Grundy gallery, Blackpool, until 5 June 2010

The broken letters of a typewriter – I wanted to start thinking about the moments when literacies can be dysfunctional. I have to be careful here – because literacy is always told in terms of limitation, lack, deficit and I have no desire to fuel this. But, I want to explore the idea of independence. This seems to be something that those who come to literacy classes value. It can be a strong motivator.

It may also be a metaphor for the dysfunctionallity of skills based approach to literacy. The letters of the typewriter lay strewn and broken,  apart from the machine that enables them to perform. 

Data analysis: making the ordinary extraordinary

The analysis builds on my previous work regarding quality in teaching language and literacy in which I argued that teachers experienced tensions between quality-as-abstract textualisation and quality-as-an-embodiment. This was connected to how practitioners are required to textualise their experiences in contrast to the embodied actuality of their experiences.  In this analysis I explore further the notion of ‘embodiment’: the ways in which practitioners assemble the disparate narratives that define their pedagogy.

While paper sets up a polarity it doesn’t rest on one. There are clearly overlaps and affordances between socio-cultural and cognitive theories of ALLN.  Bracewell and Witte (2008) point out that writing is social and material as well as cultural. Literacy as embodied how incoherencies are woven into a narrative: teacher / writer / professional / student -

Data analysis explores moments when participants touch upon these different ideas. The whole discussion is about writing – offers support in the writing of the assignment, participant is a writer (aspires to get scripts published), and the assignment itself is about teaching writing.  My focus is on literacy as the subject they teach but explores their ideas about literacy from multiple perspectives including how they experience their own engagements with text.

Analysis

University Diploma is part of general policy driven initiative to improve quality of literacy teaching predicated on basis that way to do that is define a body of knowledge to be taught and then training teachers in how to deliver it. Define what they need to know and qualification to assure their competence. There is a strong possibility that teachers may come to the course with little general interest in broader ideas about language literacy or pedagogy – but with a narrow instrumental interest in ‘tips & techniques’ that improve their teaching.

Dis/connections between context, motivation & engagement 

Joseph: teaching but not a teacher.

Has been teaching for 10 years, but talks in terms of being at a crossroads in life and asking himself ‘what do I actually want to do?’ Makes references to his age, to time running out and ‘his clock ticking’ – hinting at something of a desperation to achieve goals that are not fulfilled by teaching literacy. The qualification has an exchange value – he teaches in prison and sees the qualification as a way out of this context. The quiet desperation is evident throughout as he clearly feels this environment constrains his pedagogy. He talks about feeling burnt out, and is of the opinion that 10 years in this context is too much. Whatever the bonhomie between himself and students, there is always a threatening undercurrent.   Other teachers in prison have insisted on ensuring they see students as students and that whatever else defines the context is not their concern. But the context is physically inescapable, from the process required to observe a class, to moving around, to managing a classroom situation.

Pearl: trying to live by ideas about good interaction, feedback and talk

Had worked for years in a school – admin – upon retirement teacher and wanted to change career and teach adult literacy.  She is doing the course out of interest and works in an open access workshop in her local AEI.  She teaches on a 1-to-1 basis. Over a period of time she has worked with a single student who she has a good knowledge of. The knowledge has not been gathered as a direct result of a broadened assessment – but has been gleaned indirectly through general talk about other aspects of the students work. Not treated as being central to how literacy is taught. Throughout the tutorial she makes regular references to the reading and mentions specific theories and ideas about literacy.

She attempts throughout the directly relate these ideas to what she does. The attempts are open to discussion: what she means by context, collaboration and success are clearly ideas in the shaping. The qualification required by her student lurks and defines her pedagogy but not in a way that she experiences as constraining. This tutorial represents a shift in which we have agreed that it is possible her student may ultimately be more able to pass the test or at least improve her literacy if there is less insistent and exclusive focus on trying out multiple papers all the time.

Once conceptions of literacy are embodied they become part of a complex nexus of other considerations that cannot be teased out as a singular variable.  What and how we teach is not solely determined by technical considerations of what curricular documents say, what and how we construct our subject or what the environment determines but a shifting combination of these.

Teaching, testing and targeting:

i)                     ‘It’s not an excuse, it’s a business.’

A point sometimes made about teachers who have been practicing since the inception of SfL is that – as they have not experienced any other framework, they may not always have access to frames of reference that would enable critique. This may resonate but as the opening quote suggests this is not the case with Joseph. More concerning is that at times he embodies what might be more fairly understood as an environmental limitation.

It’s very target driven, when you are in a target driven environment professional judgement goes out the window, it suffers, because, that’s the main critique of my teaching, it’s not an excuse, it’s a business. They want more for less. It’s stressful; they are asking you for what you can’t deliver. It’s terribly stressful. I’ve had 10 years of it and I’m burnt out from it.  10 years.  It’s too long for this environment.  It’s too long. You should probably have a shelf life of 5 years.

Joseph, Prison Literacy Teacher

ii)                   She doesn’t have literacy in her life at all

Pearl grapples with ideas about literacy and is aware of the importance for her students to experience resonance between in-college and out-of-college literacies.  But here she seems to suggest that what she does in college with her as a teacher – even when she ‘provides’ her with a context drawn from real life, is ‘literacy’ but the ‘unschooled’ tasks she performs at home is not.

Respondent:   [...] She didn't do any literacy work at all.  She didn’t have literacy in her life at all.  As far as things like letter writing or reading she didn't do any.  [...] 

Interviewer:  What about things like managing her house or managing her family, or paying bills, or does she work at all?

Respondent:  Oh she works, she’s a cook and a cleaner.  [...] I know that she functions in her job and in her daily life with these things perfectly well. 

Interviewer:    So with the literacy aspects of those things?

Respondent:  Yes, she does.  She has to write orders at work, she has to leave notes for people, she has to account for things that she’s done at work and as I say, make orders. 

BRACEWELL, R.J & WITTE, S.P 2008. Implications of Practice, Activity and Semiotic Theory for Cognitive Constructs of Writing Chapter 15 in ALBRIGHT, J. & LUKE, A. Pierre Bourdieu and literacy education, Routledge, Taylor & Francis: London.

GRENFELL, M., BLOOME, D., HARDY, C., PAHL, K., ROWSELL, J. & STREET, B. V. 2011. Language, Ethnography, and Education: Bridging New Literacy Studies and Bourdieu, Oxon, Routhledge.

This paper has 2 over all purposes

Firstly, I want to explore how trainee teachers registered on a University Diploma in Literacy and ESOL course embody different conceptions of literacy.

I am conscious in this undertaking of this seemingly being an area that has been discussed in detail from within a professional community of teacher educators and while it may be recently discovered terrain for me – there is a significant body of work available to which this is a contribution. What is distinct about this discussion is I am not here driven by a desire to improve my practice as a teacher educator – as such (though that desire is always lurking). Nor am I using a social practices theoretical framework to critique a skills based approach as such.

My intention is to map trainee teachers’ changing perspective – to see if and how their view changes and if so – along what lines, and what key points in the programme and propelled by what particular engagements. Although broadly I am asking about trainees’ engagement with different conceptions of literacy, I anticipate that what will emerge are conflicting and contradictory views and it is the nature of this contestation I want to explore.  I appreciate the reflexivity that this requires as in part I am implicated in trainees developing understanding: their changing conception may be amongst other things a reflection of my professional prowess.

Given that this research stands outside of a policy infrastructure that aligns itself to the delivery of government policy – I am not a practitioner nor am I connected to any organisation with an interest in the success of policy and am able to dominate notions of both literacy or literacies – as far as this study is concerned. Literacy as social practices based on empirical research is a stark critique of a skills based approach and while they are not entirely irreconcilable, adopting a literacies approach would seem to undermine much of the infrastructure that defines the skills of life legacy that still dominates adult literacy and ESOL teaching.  

One of my current trainees quite expresses it quite well: ‘all of this is very interesting but at the end of the day, I still have to tick that box’.

What I explore with trainees are their own hybrid literacies, or hybrid literacy conceptions. Am here echoing Wilson third space literacies, Kell and the notion of literacy as shell that prohibits the formation of literacies to emerge. But my intention is to explore trainees hybrid literacies. That is the study looks at their changing ideas but in so doing I explore not their explicit answer to the question: what do you understand by the term literacy, what does it mean to be a competent literacy user. I also invite them to reflect on the implications so literacy as social practice and to annotate their own approaches to completing an assignment. I exploring their own reconciliations of literacy and literacies my focus is not restricted to an entirely academic arena but explores research participants literacies in different places and spaces.

The second exploration is methodological.

Although based largely on as aspect of my practice, I have not framed this research as action research in that I do not particularly seek to improve upon my any aspect of the programme as a result of this study. I am however conscious of being deeply implicated within the study and to ensure my altering presence part of the material under study.

The study makes use of situational analysis: grounded theory pushed around the post-modern turn.

(I will need to add to this – for now – it’s blogged , as they say – it’s late, I will return at a later stage in a different colour)

Individual Human elements / actors Literacy students: case studies Theorists – Barton, Hamilton, Un-named author Mentors John Hayes (policy Post16)	Non-human elements / actants Online spaces & electronic communications Visual representations of literacy (Curriculum documents  & statistics) ILPs / Lesson Plans / Schemes of Work / Materials Assignments
Collective Human elements / actors Students (ESOL / Literacy) Coalition Policy New Labour Policy	Implicated / silent actors / actants Race, gender and class
	Key events in situation Election Spending review and budget Events in organisations
Discursive constructions, individual or collective human actors The literacy / ESOL learner Good / Proper English Teachers metaphors for teaching	Discursive constructions of non-human actants Race / gender / class: irrelevant in official discourse & learning outcomes
Political / economic elements Work context ie teaching numeracy	Socio cultural / symbolic elements Qualification The literate adult
Temporal elements: US national historical frame Pre-Skills for Life Skills for Life Coalition	Spatial elements Training Rooms workplaces Tutorial rooms Classroom
Major issue debates (usually contested) conceptions of literacy	Related discourses (historical narrative &/or visual) changing conceptions of literacy