Susan L. Groenke

Issues in Critical Teacher Education: Insights from the Field

As we began organizing our ideas for this book, we looked for an opportunity to include some contextual information about the current state of affairs in critical teacher education. We were in the process of identifying individuals we knew were doing critical pedagogical work in their teacher education programs and inviting them to submit abstracts for possible chapters in our book. But we realized that, to our knowledge, no one had undertaken a systematic effort to try and capture a sense of what issues confront teacher educators trying to utilize critical approaches in their work, or what those critical educators are doing in response to those issues. We decided to create and distribute an open-ended questionnaire designed to collect some information about their efforts from critical teacher educators. This chapter summarizes our findings from an analysis of responses to that questionnaire.

The Metatheoretical Assumptions of Literacy Engagement: A Preliminary Centennial History

In this review of literacy education research in North America over the past century, the authors examined the historical succession of theoretical frameworks on students’ active participation in their own literacy learning, and in particular the metatheoretical assumptions that justify those frameworks. The authors used motivation and engagement as focal topics by which to trace this history because of their conceptual proximity to active literacy participation. They mapped the uses of motivation and engagement in the major literacy journals and handbooks over the past century, constructed a grounded typology of theoretical assumptions about literate agency and its development to code those uses, and reviewed similar histories of theoretical frameworks in educational, psychological, philosophical, and literary scholarship to draft a narrative history of the emergence of engaged literacies.

Small Openings in Cyberspace: Preparing Preservice Teachers to Facilitate Critical Race Talk

Since 2005, we have implemented the Web Pen Pals project, a university–middle school partnership pairing preservice English teachers with local middle school students in secure, online chat rooms to discuss young adult literature. The project is housed in the young adult literature course Susan teaches every spring semester at the University of Tennessee. While the course is mandatory for the English teachers enrolled in the postbaccalaureate secondary English licensure program that Susan coordinates, elementary teachers and teachers seeking middle grades licensure in language arts (grades 4–6) also take the course.

Teacher to Teacher: What Texts Effectively Raise Issues Related to 9/11 for Secondary Students?

Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s exploration of a Columbinelike tragedy, underscores the current generation’s attempt to define the meaning of events in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, and, by extension, of 9/11. As such, the film can help students explore their post-9/11 culture. Elephant’s cinematic detachment and deliberate lack of narrative brilliantly explore modern school life. Van Sant, avoiding explanation of Columbine, shows the loneliness and anonymity that are now unintentional byproducts of our schools. In one scene, three girls discuss friendship in a series of empty phrases as two of the girls demand that the third stop dividing her time between them and her boyfriend. The exchange is both hilarious and sad (and sadly familiar), implying that even high school friendships, once seen as the most lasting and meaningful, are lost inside a mess of inarticulate jargon. Though Van Sant’s main purpose is to make a film about an enormously tragic event, he never veers from presenting it as an absolutely ordinary day, peopled by ordinary kids. In so doing, he gives no more weight to the actions or motives of the shooters than to the nerdy girl who will not wear gym shorts to Physical Education. The power in this film comes from just that jarring, understated normalcy—until the first shots are fired, the two boys are just part of the background noise. They and their first victim (the nerdy girl) are social equals in their outsider status at this high school. Media interpretations of Columbine created a powerful misconception that the outsider is a greater danger to our safety and our lives than the school bully. Conversely, Elephant demonstrates how students instinctively understand that outsider status can also portend greatness, rebelliousness, or artistry. At the same time, students feel compelled to seek insider status. Students, not surprisingly, are comfortable with this paradox. It is not a set of circumstances they are happy with, but they accept the paradox and their complicity in it, fully aware that there is the possibility that the outsider ultimately will triumph over the benefits of peer acceptance. Unfortunately, after Columbine, the teen rebel, the high school artist, and the visionary have often been lumped in with the troubled, angry, and sometimes self-destructive teen—individuals to be avoided, not celebrated. Perhaps this explains students’ fascination with a better-known film, Napoleon Dynamite, whose ending leaves the “insider bully” wondering what went wrong. Time and again, my students will say that they see themselves in both Elephant and Napoleon Dynamite. High school can be silly; it can be disconcerting. It can be lonely; it can be lifeaffirming. And in rare circumstances, it can be terrifying. The significance 9/11 will assume when it passes from factual event to cultural metaphor will be determined by students because, even now, it is forming them. It is they who will discover where it fits and what it means. Just as Columbine was not about black trench coats or Marilyn Manson, 9/11 will not be about terrorism. It will not be about tall buildings. It will not be about jet planes. It will be about us and what we believe in. Elephant can encourage students along a dynamic path of selfdiscovery.