Anne Ruggles Gere

Normalizing the Fraughtness: How Emotion, Race, and School Context Complicate Cultural Competence.

Preservice teachers seeking to develop cultural competence can face a struggle fraught with multiple challenges, even when they are committed to culturally relevant pedagogy. This article closely analyzes one White beginning teacher’s negotiations with cultural competence during a lesson in her student teaching semester, then traces how she made sense of that lesson in the weeks and months that followed. Findings indicate that taking on cultural competence posed both cognitive and affective challenges. More specifically, emotional responses to racialized situations, inner conflicts over Whiteness, and the dynamics of the school context combined to mediate the development of cultural competence. This study suggests that teacher educators should focus not only on the achievement of cultural competence but also on the struggle involved in enacting it. By giving more attention to how beginning teachers develop cultural competence, teacher educators will be better prepared to help beginning teachers normalize the fraughtness involved in the struggle.

A Visibility Project: Learning to See How Preservice Teachers Take Up Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

This study analyzes the ways in which raced consciousness inflects developing understandings of cultural responsiveness among preservice teachers whose preparation included responses to imaginative engagement with literary texts, interactions in an underresourced school, and exploration of key concepts of culturally responsive pedagogy. The authors analyze how this preparation created spaces that made the diverse and complex understandings of cultural responsiveness held by teacher candidates and instructors visible and how raced consciousness shaped these understandings. Findings suggest that incorporation of multicultural literary texts, continual interrogation of attitudes toward race and racism, and explicit engagement with raced consciousness fosters learning about how beginning teachers take up cultural responsiveness, given the persistent stereotypes and the raced consciousness that shape their language and perceptions.

Written Composition: Toward a Theory of Evaluation.

PICK UP ANY RECENT PUBLICATION on composition and you will almost surely find some reference to the problem of evaluating writing. Teachers and researchers alike acknowledge that pronouncing judgment on a piece of writing is both important and difficult. Important because teaching students to write, sorting students for placement or admission, and research in composition all depend upon ability to discriminate levels of quality in writing. Difficult because the theoretical basis of evaluation remains unarticulated. In contrast, composition instruction has begun developing a coherent set of assumptions. For example, theorists may disagree on the relative merits of classical, tagmemic, dramatistic, and prewriting forms of invention, but they agree on the principle that invention is part of the writing process. Evaluation of writing proceeds without a similar set of principles. Yet evaluation does proceed. The need for deciding who shall attend which college, designating those competent to graduate from high school, identifying growth in writing, or determining our nations educational progress have spawned various systems for evaluating writing. Holistic scoring, quantification of syntactic features, analytic scales, and primary trait scoring illustrate the range of existing methodologies for evaluating writing. Rather than evolving from commonly held assumptions about evaluation, each method rests upon its own set of assumptions. Statistical computations of reader responses provide the rationale for holistic scoring and analytical scales; developmental stages of language acquisition account for quantification of syntactic features; a triangular model of discourse underlies primary trait scoring. Each of these systems and the assumptions underlying it represent careful and intelligent thought, and my purpose here is not to denigrate any of them. I cite them simply as illustrations of my point. Driven by the necessity to evaluate writing, theorists have avoided examination of the nature of evaluation itself and have moved directly to devising means (and rationales for these means) for accomplishing this difficult task. In this article I wish to propose a more general theory of evaluation and to suggest how it might be worked out in practical terms. This theory grows out of a philosophical and linguistic debate on the question of meaning. The debate, best summarized by P. F. Strawsons distinction between

Revealing Silence: Rethinking Personal Writing

Joseph Conrads tale The Secret Sharer reminds us of the human double, the doppleglinger or twin that represents the other (or under) side of a person. Interpreters of Conrad frequently explain that the fully mature man at the end of The Secret Sharer emerges from an integration of the two. Without acknowledging and incorporating his other (and darker) self, the young captain narrator would never become an adult. I make a similar claim about compositions capacious term personal writing. Briefly, I want to call attention to its other (silent) side as a way of mediating among the conflicting discourses that currently swirl around personal writing and as a way of rethinking the pedagogies

Both Sides of the Desk: Collaborative Self-Study in Teacher Education

Abstract Teachers educators face the challenge of helping preservice teachers launch their career-long professional learning. The authors describe how they address this challenge by building stronger connections between teaching practices in their own methods classes and in the K-12 schools where preservice teachers observe and teach. These efforts were strengthened by their collaborative work in the Michigan English Language Arts Frameworks (MELAF) project. This state standards project—an integrated approach to speaking, reading, writing, listening, and viewing—aligns curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional development. The MELAF content standards and professional developmental guidelines also provided a common text against which the authors could intepret their own curriculum and practices. The authors describe how reflective dialogue, action research, and critical inquiry into a standards-based English language arts curriculum supported revisions and improvements in their classroom practi...

Making the Journey toward Cultural Competence with Poetry.

This article describes an innovative pedagogy for developing culturally responsive dispositions: having teacher candidates write poems exploring their developing knowledge of themselves and urban students. While promising, the poems highlighted that teacher candidates may ignore racial identity, rely on heroic narratives, and make too-easy connections with their urban students.

An Art of Survivance: Angel DeCora at Carlisle

In an autobiography published in a 1911 issue of the Red Man, a newspaper produced at Carlisle Indian School, Winnebago teacher Angel DeCora wrote: “There is no doubt that the young Indian has a talent for the pictorial art, and the Indian’s artistic conception is well worth recognition, and the school-trained Indians of Carlisle are developing it into possible use that it may become his contribution to American art.” 1 Throughout her nine years at Carlisle (1906 –15), DeCora repeated versions of this statement in speeches to the National Education Association, the Society of American Indians, the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian, and Quebec’s International Congress of Americanists.2 She also published a similar statement in at least one other Indian school publication.3 DeCora’s three points about Indians’ inherent artistic talent, the value of Indian art, and its place in American art summarize the strategic and important alternatives she offered to then current perceptions and enactments of Indian art through her own artistic productions and her teaching at Carlisle. Operating from a constrained racial and gendered position, this artist-teacher engaged with white-dominated approaches to Indian art to transform them for her own and future generations. DeCora’s alternatives helped enable American Indian survivance and led to a reshaping of the cultural category of American art. “Survivance,” a term used by Gerald Vizenor to describe American Indian capacity to combine survival with resistance, was aided at that time—DeCora wrote two decades after the massacre at Wounded Knee and when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (1883–1913) was still a fixture in American entertainment—by the seemingly peaceful, non-warlike, qualities of art. AmeriAn Art of Survivance

Writing and Conceptual Learning in Science: An Analysis of Assignments

This systematic review of 46 published articles investigates the constructs employed and the meanings assigned to writing in writing-to-learn assignments given to students in science courses. Using components of assignments associated with the greatest learning gains—meaning making, clear expectations, interactive writing processes, and metacognition—this review illuminates the constructs of writing that yield conceptual learning in science. In so doing, this article also provides a framework that can be used to evaluate writing-to-learn assignments in science, and it documents a new era in research on writing to learn in science by showing the increased rigor that has characterized studies in this field during the past decade.

Investigation of the role of writing-to-learn in promoting student understanding of light–matter interactions

Fundamental quantum chemistry concepts—quantization of energy, electronic structure, and light–matter interaction—are essential for understanding chemistry and spectroscopy, an important tool for studying molecules. However, very few studies have investigated how students learn and understand these concepts or how their learning can be supported. Drawing on the capacity of writing to support learning of difficult concepts, we designed an intervention that targeted quantum concepts in the context of the use of spectroscopy for identifying chemical composition of the Orion Nebula. A quasi-experimental design with a pre-post assessment on a control and treatment group was used to identify the gains associated with completing the WTL activity. Results from a three-tiered assessment show that WTL students significantly improved in their explanations of the concept of spectroscopic transitions and their overall confidence in their understanding. Analysis of their writing, follow-up interviews, and feedback served to explain the changes observed on the pre-post assessment.

Identifying and Remediating Student Misconceptions in Introductory Biology via Writing-to-Learn Assignments and Peer Review

Student misconceptions are an obstacle in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses and unless remediated may continue causing difficulties in learning as students advance in their studies. Writing-to-learn assignments (WTL) are characterized by their ability to promote in-depth conceptual learning by allowing students to explore their understanding of a topic. This study sought to determine whether and what types of misconceptions are elicited by WTL assignments and how the process of peer review and revision leads to remediation or propagation of misconceptions. We examined four WTL assignments in an introductory biology course in which students first wrote about content by applying it to a realistic scenario, then participated in a peer-review process before revising their work. Misconceptions were identified in all four assignments, with the greatest number pertaining to protein structure and function. Additionally, in certain contexts, students used scientific terminology incorrectly. Analysis of the drafts and peer-review comments generated six profiles by which misconceptions were addressed through the peer-review process. The prevalent mode of remediation arose through directed peer-review comments followed by correction during revision. It was also observed that additional misconceptions were elicited as students revised their writing in response to general peer-review suggestions.