Storytelling into Understanding
IMPLICATIONS OF THE STUDY
I realized at some point in the study that Eve was beginning to be as much of an enigma to me as Lizabeth. If the reasons for Lizabeth’s apparent difficulty with the subject matter of the Study Group were not easy to locate, neither was Eve’s rapid accession to understanding and the fluency she demonstrated with FMC in her classroom. It is probably true to say that if I had been simply teaching FMC rather than researching the process of teaching and learning in which it was embedded, I might not have looked further. In the press of time and obligations, I might have found it easy to end my thinking with a few hunches and the act of awarding course grades. Instead, I was committed by the process I was involved in to using the teachers’ practical experiences as a way of assessing their understanding and as a way to encourage their reflections on what they had learned.
I was obligated, as well, by the approach to data I was using, to seek the markers of their understanding in behavior other than direct self-reports. It was certainly true that there seemed to be some relevant differences in the bare facts of what Lizabeth and Eve told me in response to purposeful questions about their backgrounds. Lizabeth had been schooled entirely in education, primarily at small institutions, whereas Eve’s education included early parochial school education, a Bachelor’s in liberal arts, and post-baccalaureate work at a major state university. Eve had put in eight years in a big-city school with huge numbers of LM students from both the U.S. and abroad before coming to La Tierra Encantada. Lizabeth’s prior experience had been confined to a small-town school with few LMs. That was by far from being the whole picture, however. Ultimately, the stories told by both participants did much more than reveal the canvases of their old and new Discourses. They also pointed the way to other texts, other strands of meaning, in the data that helped fill in the gaps.
For Eve, the journey from TEACHING READING to TEACHING FMC was much shorter than it was for Lizabeth. From the very start, Eve’s stories entailed a Principal at sufficient remove from her students to generalize about teaching activities. Changes in her footing were apparent primarily as a matter of degree, especially in her increasing command of the terminology of FMC and the motivated discovery of new relationships among the terms. At the end of the study, she was juggling the pieces of FMC like a pro, certain of their weight, their relationships, and where they would land if not coordinated with each other. Lizabeth was still moving tentatively in the new territory. She was able to teach her students to identify Known and New propositions and then to draw a field model, but there were indications that she did not see the process as the integrated one it has to be. As had been pointed out and illustrated frequently during Study Group discussions, identifying Known and New occurs simultaneously with construction of the field model. Lizabeth continued, to the end, to describe the two processes as discrete activities.
Ironically, perhaps, Eve is a more difficult sort of participant to study than Lizabeth. Eve repeatedly claimed that she was unable to make generalizations about her pedagogy, preferring instead to say simply that what she did was intuitive and “just made sense.” She also said she had no idea why she was learning FMC so much more rapidly than the rest of the Study Group, and there were moments when I suspected she was masking the full extent of her understanding so that the others would not feel left out. I turned, in my quandary, to a careful review of our interviews and my observations of her teaching. The major surprise for me was the discovery that there were several important matches between my background and hers. For one, Eve had even more extensive knowledge of text type taxonomy than I had remembered before I reviewed our interviews. Not only had she received some exposure to the subject in college, but she was able to freely manipulate terminology such as genre, exposition, cause-and-effect, and comparison contrast. In addition, she had extensive experience teaching both literature and social studies at Tierra Encantada, as well as a demanding undergraduate major that required her to do intensive learning from expository text. Eve’s teaching style, moreover, was very similar to my own. It involved engaging students in Socratic dialogue, challenging their ideas, insisting on rationales for their conclusions, pushing them from idea to idea by engaging their logic and background understanding, forcing them to independent intellectual work and critical thinking as rapidly as possible.
Lizabeth’s teaching, by comparison, seemed more consciously committed to the objective of building and maintaining a harmonious classroom community. It seems likely to me now that her focus on discrete activities and skills was linked to this goal in that it allowed her students to create tangible products they could take pride in. Her classroom approach pointed overwhelmingly to the desire to keep her students happy, and it is reasonable to assume that student contentment was something she privileged in the name of also keeping them learning.
In this light, FMC may have posed her some problems. As I described it to the Study Group, FMC is especially committed to the oral negotiation of meaning in the classroom, not necessarily or overwhelmingly to the notion of constructing Field Models in visual form, of coming up with visible “products” of learning. As I described it, the how-to particulars were deliberately left up to the individual teacher. Lizabeth experienced difficulty making the transition to the classroom, and did not in fact do so with the same independence of the other teachers. She used the materials and ideas they had already used and, even as late as the Study Group’s last session, involved herself in continuing to quiz her colleagues about the precise steps they had used in explaining FMC to their students.
Both sets of facts—Lizabeth’s devotion to her students’ sense of accomplishment and the continuities between Eve’s background and teaching style and my own—point to what I feel I need to be aware of in the future as I continue to involve teachers in expanding their knowledge about language. Contrary to some of the assumptions with which I began my study, I do not need to be so much concerned with the clarity of my explanations of linguistic principles. “Known and New” turned out to be the most accessible piece of information I presented. It is an important concept with great promise, I feel, for helping teachers do some remarkable work and helping young language learners develop crack reading skills, but to show teachers how to do Field Model Construction, attention needs to be paid to the broader context in which the procedure is situated.
I had thought I was covering important bases here, as well, when I focused on profiles of the L2 reader during early Study Group work, but the context was even wider than I knew. What is just as important as knowledge about language and the needs of learner populations is attention to what Gordon Wells calls “the ecology of the classroom community” (1996, p. 96)—the unwritten rules of each teacher’s classroom that are based in the teacher’s beliefs about learning and social relations. Eve’s rules were very different from Lizabeth’s and were in fact very similar to my own, which were more embedded than I had realized in my ideas about L2 reading strategy training. Understanding FMC depended for my research participants on an understanding of my unwritten rules and how my rules compared to the teachers’; using it successfully depended on using my rules or, if not, at least finding others that would work equally well.
The literature on teacher education points out that novice teachers frequently reduplicate the unconsciously-acquired models of their own teachers and need to be provided with sufficient strategies to practice if they are to make the transition to new models (Pence, in press). Since neither Eve nor Lizabeth are novices, my experience with them suggests that these issues are pertinent to the work of teachers across the experience spectrum, and that one way to raise pedagogical assumptions to the level of visibility is to provide strategies for practice as well as rich opportunities for interactive reflection on how the strategies mesh or do not mesh with the broader context of the existing classroom environment. Allowing my teacher-participants the freedom to develop their own classroom strategies for teaching FMC was very important to my study. If I teach FMC in the future with the less complicated, but more difficult, goal of simply teaching it, I will proceed somewhat differently. The ultimate objective—education reform—becomes possible when we understand that a shift in one small piece involves a shift in a number of other pieces as well.
