[The Montana Professor 25.2, Spring 2015 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]

Sustaining a Community of Learners

Allison Wynhoff Olsen, PhD
Assistant Professor of English
Montana State University Bozeman

I am most at home in a school bustling with activity, hallways lined with student lockers, and classrooms filled with the energy of youth. A teacher for the past seventeen years, I have taught high school and middle school students English, reading, and speech; tutored individual students across disciplines; taught graduate and undergraduate students' education courses; and currently teach English education, linguistics, and writing to MSU students. In so doing, I have attended at least 30 potlucks, directed a handful of theatre productions, coached over 100 hours of dance practice, and engaged in face to face and online conversations on topics ranging from phonetic pronunciations to the pace of life, privileges, and relationships within Jane Austen's Emma. Focusing now on the pedagogies that promote student learning, I center research, service, and teaching on relationships.

Throughout this essay, I will explain the initiatives I have been a part of since I began working in the English department at MSU in the fall of 2013. I will discuss three areas of focus: the addition of service learning components to our program, instructional moves I have made to foreground a shift from student to teacher identities, and the community of learners who make up the MSU English Education Community. Depending on the context, I refer to our MSU students in our program as "students" and as "pre-service teachers."

Service learning

I had one simple goal for my first year (2013-14) at MSU: Get into high school classrooms and meet local, practicing English teachers. It is important to me that as an English teacher educator, I am connected with practicing English teachers and their students. I do not want to talk to my pre-service teachers about teaching and solely use my experiences when I was at the secondary level; rather, I aim to know and begin understanding the local teachers, students, and curriculum that my pre-service teachers will be exposed to in their various field experiences. My English education colleague, Dr. Robert Petrone,/1/ shared my interest. During my first semester at MSU, we met with the English department teachers at one of our local high schools.

At this meeting, Rob and I established connections with the teachers and had generative conversations about the high school and its English curriculum. We shared ideas for connecting our students with more high school classrooms during their English education program and brainstormed ways we (as a program) may help support the teachers.

While at the meeting, one of the teachers asked us a telling question: What are your feelings about the Common Core? Before I share my answer, I will offer a brief overview of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

At present, the United States K-12 educational system is entrenched in the CCSS, a political initiative adopted by 43 of the 50 states (National Governors). Not a national curriculum per se, the CCSS is a shift from previous state-created and -adopted standards. Written by the National Governors Association, the CCSS is an attempt to offer more similar curriculum across the nation. The stated exigence is for students to be "college- and career-ready," and literacy is foregrounded across grade levels and disciplines. As standards-based expectations before them, the CCSS documents identify curricular outcomes via anchor standards and grade-specific expectations. States and school districts purchase company-created (e.g., Pearson), computer-based, CCSS-aligned assessments for students to take in the Spring of the year; depending on the school district, students and teachers may be held accountable for the results.

Given the political nature of the CCSS, I was not surprised that Rob and I were asked how we felt about it; rather, I saw the question as a way to gauge our investment (or not) in standardized curriculum/assessments and to see how/if we aligned with the teachers' ideologies. As I shared in the lunch meeting, teachers are intelligent professionals who do not need documents like the CCSS to know how to set goals for their students or develop their curriculum. Yes, we teachers must know the CCSS and attend to it because it is a part of federal funding and many schools' initiatives; however, effective teachers are already going well beyond the standards in what they offer their students. In addition, I take issue with the standardized approach that assumes all students learn at the same pace. I also disagree with the notion that students can show their understanding through a few questions on a decontextualized, a priori assessment. Finally, the CCSS documents have "no mention of the social complexities of classroom life; no call for teachers to require students to experience, imagine, think, and feel" (Rives & Wynhoff Olsen, in press, p. 6).

This meeting also marked the beginning of our service learning connections with four of these local teachers, with the goal of forging a relationship between our two English departments. Guided by the needs of the high school students and our pre-service teachers (who specifically desired more time working with "real" students), we created after-school tutoring sessions. Over the next two semesters, we shifted the work into classrooms: our pre-service teachers served as additional support systems for the students, facilitated writing workshops, and helped the teachers provide feedback on student work. This spring many of our students branched out of the classroom and worked as prom chaperones.

Simultaneously, I initiated conversations to connect with additional English and writing educators at another local high school and at Gallatin College. For two semesters, I sent teams of students to serve as writing tutors on three specific writing days at the second local high school. I also co-coordinated a partnership with Dr. Jeff Hostetler and his WRIT 101 class. For three semesters, I sent a team of pre-service teachers to facilitate writing groups with the 101 students, offering them additional audience and feedback. Across both of these writing-specific opportunities, our pre-service teachers were able to consider their developing pedagogies and practice how to talk with fellow writers during the drafting process and how to provide feedback on written essays. Both teams were also able to experience writers developing over time, a facet to teaching that is not easy to simulate prior to the student teaching semester.

During my second year, I also reached out to two of our recent graduates who were teaching writing to high school students out of the local area: one in rural Montana and one in a larger city. We created online writing connections, taking part in both one-on-one writing exchanges and online writing groups. Both of the teachers use Google Drive with their high school students, so we linked into their work on that platform. This offered our pre-service teachers opportunity to think about how to provide feedback via the written "insert comments" feature, particularly because they are navigating across corrective and rhetorical feedback. The two teachers we worked with also offered perspectives that helped situate the assignments and the writers, reminding the current MSU students that writing is subjective yet that objective expectations and assignments are critical.

I am humbled by the teachers who granted us access to their classrooms and their students. At present, three of our English education courses have become infused with new service learning opportunities that stretch our students and help us isolate and discuss tensions that occur while moving them into teaching roles. Dr. Petrone and I could easily bemoan the theory/practice divide that permeates much of teacher education; instead, we are carving out relationships with teachers and students so our pre-service teachers can solidify content understandings and experience both teaching and learning.

Shifting identities

It is typical for teacher educators to consider much more than coursework objectives while preparing future teachers. While it matters how students perform on assignments and the consistency (or not) of their attendance record, there are more telling indicators of whether they will be successful teachers: how they position their upcoming students, how they connect with the field of education in general and with in-service teachers specifically, and how (if?) they assume a teacher identity. I am beginning to understand that another indicator is how the students conceptualize learning.

During my second year at MSU, my goals were to continue service-learning initiatives and make transitions from student to teacher more embodied. To do that, I took a risk. I explicitly removed some traditional aspects of schooling in my pre-service English education courses with the intent to make my students wobble—defined as "a calling to attention, a provocation of response" as well as a "liminal state, a state of transition" (Fecho, 2011, p. 47) and to foreground cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957; McFalls & Cobb-Roberts, 2001), explained informally as "psychological tension or dissonance" "an individual can experience...when new knowledge or information is incongruent with previously acquired knowledge. Because dissonance between opposing ideas is unpleasant, people are motivated to reduce the dissonance" (McFalls & Cobb-Roberts, 2001, p. 165). Given that they are preparing to be secondary English teachers, I need my students to feel the emotions and stressors involved with learning, not to remain in the comfortable role of student—a role they understand and enact without much thought—and instead embody our shared spaces. Embodying the learning experience and marking it as physical and emotional allows for rich, meta-level conversations that are necessary for us to discuss as they transition and take on teacher identities.

The move that caused the most dissonance was a direct statement I made in week one, "I will not give you a syllabus for this class." I did post a document explaining signature assignments (those assignments that I would use as indicators of learning and would grade) as well as overall course expectations to our class D2L site; what was withheld, however, was a fixed calendar of readings/tasks/topics for the term. I explicitly shared that I was aware that many of them were uncomfortable not knowing every detail from the beginning, and I welcomed individuals to come talk with me during office hours. I was interested in being responsive to their needs with the freedom to select readings that would help us move forward as a class community. I had no desire to use an a priori agenda; rather, I intended to model how to move with the ebb and flow of a class.

I began teaching, asking my students to pay attention to in-class announcements and weekly or multi-week reading calendars posted to D2L. A major tension developed with a few students who wanted to work ahead on their projects. At first, I was unaffected and easily talked with individuals or restated what I was not providing this term; however, as the semester continued I felt more unease and irritation. I knew that I was giving information with enough time for students to accomplish the objectives and be assessed fairly, yet it was becoming more and more apparent that the ways I was teaching did not match the ways that several of my students were comfortable learning. It took me several conversations and workouts at my gym for me to recognize the underlying issue at play: my students were still "doing school," entrenched in being students, working toward grades, and planning their tasks and readings in ways that fit their schedules rather than slowing down and following my lead and my timeline as I unveiled it. Put more academically, my students were engaged in procedural display (Bloome, Puro, & Theodorou, 1989): the display of a set of academic procedures that are recognized by teachers, students, and the outside community, rather than investing in learning—a topic we far too often do not consider.

As I reflect on these experiences, I am reminded of Fecho's (2011) premise, "For where there is wobble, change is occurring" (Fecho, 2011, p. 47). I set out to make change and better a program not because it was flawed, but because my colleague and I are developing a shared vision that challenges us and our students to be vulnerable. I was prepared for students to push back and work toward relieving their own dissonance, yet it was not until I experienced dissonance in time with them that I recognized my new goal for our program: Foreground theories of learning as a base for how we teach, interact, assess, and share time with youth. Rather than encourage our students to "do school," we should promote the messiness of learning.

MSU English Education community

The final area of impact came through social media and an impulse: "Let's make a Facebook group for our program!" Currently a closed group of 74 people, our members are current MSU English education students, program graduates, professors, practicing teachers, and a few English education scholars whose work we study. Since its conception, our FB group has provided us a fast, easily accessed platform on which to share changes in service learning (e.g. cancellations, the need for a car pool), advertise and support local events, and connect with one another in-between class and across distance. Current students post questions about the upcoming PRAXIS exam and student teaching placements, graduated students who are teaching ask for advice with curricular planning, and several of us post inspirational quotes and current news to discuss with the group. Over the last few months our students and graduates have taken ownership of the space and most recently used it to start a summer book club.

While not all of our students partake in the Facebook group, the networking it offers is incredible. Everyone is busy, yet people make time for social networking; people who do not regularly check email get Facebook alerts on their phone and then respond. This simple way of being an online presence emulates our broader field, as English education, strands within the National Council Teachers of English (NCTE) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA), as well as professional journals in literacy (e.g., JAAL) have a dialogic presence on Facebook.

The MSU English Education community is full of people playing active roles, a "community of learners" with an "asymmetry of roles" (Rogoff, 1994, p. 213). In schools, students are often segregated from adults—the knowers of information (Rogoff)—yet when teaching and learning is enacted outside of school walls, roles are more fluid. It is this fluid infusion of a "community of learners" approach that we are working to create and sustain.

Closing comments

I strive to embody a critical, sociocultural approach to English in the state of Montana. As an English teacher educator, I position my students, colleagues, and extended community of practicing teachers and youth as members of a community. Wobble, cognitive dissonance, meta conversations, service learning and networking are occurring within the English education program at MSU. I am equal parts grateful and exhausted to be a part of the change.

References

Notes

1. It is significant to note that Robert Petrone and I work alongside one another in the MSU English education program. This essay offers my perspective as a newer colleague, yet does not suggest I work alone. In fact, I hope that my essay makes obvious that my work is centered on relationships and collaboration and for me, that begins with my partnership with Rob.[Back]

[The Montana Professor 25.2, Spring 2015 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]