Elizabeth Dutro

“I Like to Read, but I Know I’m Not Good at It”: Children’s Perspectives on High‐Stakes Testing in a High‐Poverty School

Abstract A significant body of research articulates concerns about the current emphasis on high‐stakes testing as the primary lever of education reform in the United States. However, relatively little research has focused on how children make sense of the assessment policies in which they are centrally located. In this article, we share analyses of interview data from 33 third graders in an urban elementary school collected as part of a larger qualitative study of children’s experiences in literacy in high‐poverty classroom. Our analysis of assessment‐focused interviews focused on two research questions related to children’s perspectives on high‐stakes testing: What patterns arise in children’s talk about high‐stakes testing? What does children’s talk about high‐stakes testing reveal about their perceptions of the role of testing in their school experiences and how they are positioned within the system of accountability they encounter in school? Drawing on tools associated with inductive approaches to learning from qualitative data as well as critical discourse analysis, we discuss three issues that arose in children’s responses: language related to the adults invested in their achievement; their sense of the stakes involved in testing; and links between their feelings about test taking, perceptions of scores, and assumptions of competence. We argue that children’s perspectives on their experiences with high‐stakes testing provide crucial insights into how children construct relationships to schooling, relationships that have consequences for their continued engagement in school.

‘That's why I was crying on this book’: Trauma as Testimony in Responses to Literature

I was 16, sitting in junior English, when my teacher, with her usual style and drama began reading the first lines of Karl Shapiro’s poem about sudden trauma, the tragedy of innocent lives cut short. I heard the word ambulance; I saw it on the page in front of me, the stark black print beginning to waver, along with the words that followed – stretchers, mangled, hospital. A slight tremble in my fingers spread quickly to more general quaking. Just a few lines of verse and I was unable to hold my pencil, unable to focus on the page or my classmates’ faces, each blurring into the other. At the poem’s ninth line I bolted from the classroom, unsure how I had managed to will my trembling limbs to move, and only slightly aware of the pause in my teacher’s reading. I ran, to some deserted locker-lined corridor, to escape the words that had too soon spoken my experience back to me. It was my own experience and the experiences of some of the children with whom I have collaborated in my research studies in urban classrooms that first prompted my thinking about trauma as a response to literature and the testimony and witnessing that such response requires. In search of a theoretical language that felt adequate to express the importance of those experiences, manifest as difficult stories that students brought to English classrooms, I turned to literary trauma studies. In recent years, trauma studies – an interdisciplinary field that explores trauma, memory and representation – has grown dramatically (e.g. Curuth 1995; Kaplan 2005; Leys 2000; Whitehead 2004). The burgeoning field of literary trauma studies examines the presence and role of trauma in literature, film, and significant culturalhistorical events (e.g. Eng and Kazanjian 2003; Hartman 1995; Leys 2000; Whitehead 2004; Yeager 2002). As such, it is not clinical, nor does it seek to ‘heal’.

Revealing Writing, Concealing Writers High-Stakes Assessment in an Urban Elementary Classroom

Drawing on the combined theoretical lenses of positioning theory and academic literacies, this article presents case studies of four children from one urban classroom, two of whom scored at or above proficient on the large-scale writing assessments required by their district and state and two of whom scored below. Using criteria from state rubrics, we closely analyzed the writing products children produced for high-stakes assessments and classroom writing projects as well as drew on a range of qualitative data to contextualize children’s writing within the complex relationships with writing observed across the school year. Our findings suggest test scores may be inaccurate or highly malleable based on relations between the features of the writing children produced, students’ identities as writers and preferred practices, quirks of the testing context, and arbitrary features of the test itself. Indeed, our analyses found that some children’s test scores misrepresented their capabilities as demonstrated in the writing they produced both within and outside of the testing situation. Furthermore, the form of the assessments risked positioning these children in just the ways that would frustrate rather than promote their attempts to put their best writing on the page. Our data suggest that the children’s test scores did not provide the information about achievement in writing that such tests are assumed to convey and that both the form of on-demand writing assessments and the dichotomized sorting they facilitate potentially undermine some of the very goals, often articulated by policy makers, underlying the push for accountability through testing.

Making Sense of “The Boy Who Died”: Tales of a Struggling Successful Writer

This article presents a case study of a fourth grade boys experiences in writing, preceding and following a story he wrote about a boy whose struggles in writing led directly to his death. We explore how Maxs writing experiences related to his identity, specifically his sense of himself as a writer, his struggle to communicate his ideas, and his discomfort with expressing private thoughts and emotions in print. Drawing on a range of qualitative data, we examine Maxs experiences with writing workshop, journal writing, responding to literature, and a state writing assessment. Maxs story argues for the importance of considering issues of identity in the writing classroom to help students build on the successes that often hide behind the surface struggles of their writing.

Standards for Primary-Grade Reading: An Analysis of State Frameworks.

The purpose of this article is to analyze state standards for early reading/language arts from 2 perspectives-what is known about standards and what is known about early reading. Guided by criteria that address equity, content, and specificity established by the Council of Chief State School Officers in collaboration with 9 other educational organizations, we analyzed the standards of 42 states with an emphasis on a subset of 14 documents that provide grade-by-grade information for grades K-3. The analyses revealed that (1) documents that do not provide standards for each grade miss important content that is unique to K-3 levels, (2) benchmarks/objectives vary along a continuum from very general to highly specific, (3) documents vary in the ways in which they conceptualize and organize the area of reading, (4) many documents do not provide a viable curricular path across grade levels, and (5) some documents include content inappropriate for certain grade levels and/or ignore important content. The implications of these results for the development of local systems of curriculum, instruction, and assessment are discussed.

Listening to the Speaking Wound A Trauma Studies Perspective on Student Positioning in Schools

This article discusses theoretical lenses drawn from scholars in the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies to consider students’ positioning in relation to emotional-cognitive, private-public dichotomies that permeate normative notions of what can and should count as successful engagement with school. Specifically, we explicate Caruth’s metaphor of the speaking wound, in conversation with other trauma studies scholarship, to consider the representations of lived experiences carried into classrooms and the consequences of interpreting and representing students’ lives. To provide context for our conceptual argument, we discuss qualitative data of two students’ experiences across a school year. We argue that trauma theory illuminates two overlapping, yet distinguishable, ways trauma can be productively conceptualized in schools and marshaled as a context for analyzing structural inequities: first, to consider the trauma individuals carry into classrooms as a potential source for deepening students’ connections to school; second, to recognize how some students’ positioning within the institution of public schooling in the United States constitutes a trauma that must be heard and proactively addressed. In both conceptualizations, we argue for inserting trauma theory into conversations about the moral and pedagogical imperative to work toward increased equity in schools and classrooms.

Towards a Pedagogy of the Incomprehensible: Trauma and the Imperative of Critical Witness in Literacy Classrooms.

In this article, I explore questions about what it means to carry, live and invite traumatic stories into the space of a literacy classroom. Weaving illustrative moments from the classroom with trauma theory and research, I ask, What does it mean to embrace the incomprehensible in literacy classrooms? How might the incomprehensible be viewed as a productive and connected space in students’ academic and social experiences in schools? To delve into these questions, I turn to scholars who conceptualize trauma and its relationship with what we can access through and at the limits of articulation and to two young children’s writing and talk. In particular, I situate children’s experiences in trauma studies scholar Caruth’s ideas about the inadequacy of language in the face of trauma and cultural theorist Massumi’s arguments about affect as that which escapes our efforts to structure experience. I argue that incomprehensibility invokes an important metaphorical space of not knowing that demands reciprocal approaches testimony and critical witness responses that can serve to collapse the binaries so often employed in efforts to make sense of children’s lives and literacies.

Chapter 3: The Challenge of Developing Content Standards

Standards-based initiatives have been the centerpiece of educational reform in the United States for well over a decade. The term standards encompasses several elements of curricular reform, including content standards, performance standards, and opportunity-to-learn standards. This review focuses primarily on content standards, documents that define what students should know and be able to do in given subject areas. The story of content standards is a national story, a state story, a story of specific disciplines, and a story of philosophical and theoretical shifts and differences that have had an impact on views of teaching and learning across disciplines. Content standards represent ideas about what disciplinary content is most important for students to know and be able to do across years of schooling. However, content standards are also ideological, reflecting values and beliefs regarding the nature of teaching and learning and, more generally, the purposes of education. Tracing the interplay of ideas and values in standards and standards development—or, in other words, examining the intellectual roots of content standards and the debates that inform their development and use—reveals the complexities inherent in this aspect of standardsbased reform. Our analysis examines three areas of literature: first, the documents and reports that started U.S. educational policy down the path toward national standards; second, literature on the development and evaluation of specific content standards documents; and, third, literature that informed the debates that arose within the groups that developed standards and that followed their dissemination. We identify the tensions that have arisen among the policymakers, business leaders, educators, and public interest groups involved in the setting of standards. We also describe the factors that are operative in any specific standards development effort and how these factors influence decisions in areas such as organization of subject areas, desired level of specificity, processes used to achieve consensus, and effective evaluation of a given set of standards. We then provide a case study of how this has worked in English language arts

“Can We Talk About Intimacy?”: The Wire and a Pedagogy of Testimony and Witness in Urban Classrooms

When first-year teacher, Mr. Prezbolewski calls names on his after school detention list and Michael, an eighth-grade student in an inner-city Baltimore school, is absent, we, the viewers of Michael’s story, understand why. We know that each day after school Michael walks directly to the neighborhood elementary school to pick up his little brother and walk him home. Michael does this everyday. When they get home, he gets his brother a snack and settles him in at the kitchen table to complete his homework. On the first day of school, we watch Michael and his brother walk down the steps of their row house, Michael pausing to wipe the breakfast crumbs off of his brother’s face and tie his shoes. By the time Michael skips detention, we have seen enough of his life to understand that staying after school is simply not an option for Michael. Michael’s friends Randy and Dukie stop by the detention classroom and Randy, noticing that Michael’s name is circled on the attendance list, says, ‘‘You know, Mr. P, Michael can’t make it to detention.’’ The teacher responds, ‘‘I know he didn’t and now it’s doubled.’’ Randy shakes his head, ‘‘Nah, I mean he can’t. He’s got to go pick up his little brother from school.’’ Prez (as he is known in the show) says, ‘‘he’ll just have to find somebody else to do that.’’ Dukie responds, ‘‘No, it ain’t like that. Michael would come if he could, but he wouldn’t have nobody else to pick up his little brother, Bug. You know, his mother, she’s on that stuff.’’ The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 33:132–160, 2011 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2011.569460

Reading in Contested Terrain

It is not an easy time to be a reading educator. Teachers of reading in both K–12 and university classrooms face unprecedented scrutiny and navigate a political and ideological minefield. Political undercurrents run through almost all aspects of the field, infusing terminology, federal reports and reform efforts, curriculum, and foundation-sponsored research (see Shaker & Heilman, 2004; Wixson, Dutro, & Athan, 2004). Terms such as “scientific approaches to reading” or “whole language” are not neutral but rather imply political and ideological stances toward teaching and learning in reading. Federal efforts to define quality reading research and legislate reading instruction have generated intense debate. Furthermore, foundations funding research, such as the recent report by the National Center on Teacher Quality titled “What Education Schools Aren’t Teaching About Reading and What Elementary Teachers Aren’t Learning” (Walsh, Glaser, & Wilcox, 2006), are increasingly politicized. Although many scholars would argue that literacy is inherently ideological, embedded with socially and culturally dependent and power-laden assumptions of what counts as literate practice (e.g., Gee, 1992; Street, 1995), there is no doubt that the field of reading is currently politicized in particularly overt ways. Into this fray enters Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading, a volume that discusses the knowledge base in reading within a developmental framework for teacher learning. The volume, edited by Catherine Snow, Peg Griffin, and M. Susan Burns, synthesizes the work of the National Academy of Education’s Subcommittee on Reading (a committee that was formed as part of the work of the Committee on Teacher Education). I draw on the politics of reading to frame my review of this volume for two reasons: first, because it is simply impossible to avoid in the current climate and, second, because learning theories—what theories are included and excluded in discussions of what counts as quality reading instruction —are embedded in those politics. Although rarely engaging those politics overtly, Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading functions as both an important synthesis of research on reading and as an implicit critique of both the undertheorized approaches to reading embedded in much federal policy and the attempts to limit what counts as legitimate methodology in research on reading. The authors carve out a moderate space in an often-polarized discussion, which, like many moderate