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Abstract the Role of Middle Schools ABSTRACT THE ROLE OF MIDDLE SCHOOLS: TOWARD LIFELONG LITERACY AND A TRUE DIVERSITY by Dixon S. Woodburn Written as a reflection on several years of experience teaching in a middle school language arts classroom, this study diagnoses the main problems with current approaches to literacy at secondary levels and makes recommendations for the individual classroom teacher to overcome these problems. Literacy skills should be practiced in continuity across the curriculum and in everyday life, but too often remain isolated by grade level and set curricular units, reinforced by standardized testing. This study emphasizes the uniqueness of the middle school student age group, the possibilities of a language-rich learning environment, and the potential for a curriculum of understanding through doing to make literacy transferable between disciplines and rooted into students’ everyday lives. These approaches serve the desired outcome of providing accessible literacy to all students, encouraging lifelong learning and habits of self- reflection in the students’ pursuits for greater understanding of themselves and others in a diverse society. THE ROLE OF MIDDLE SCHOOLS: TOWARD LIFELONG LITERACY AND A TRUE DIVERSITY A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Teaching Department of English by Dixon Storm Woodburn Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2003 Advisor ____________________________________ (Dr. Mary J. Fuller) Reader ____________________________________ (Dr. Diana A. Royer) THE ROLE OF MIDDLE SCHOOLS: TOWARD LIFELONG LITERACY AND A TRUE DIVERSITY Table of Contents I. The Middle School Problem . 2 • Acknowledging the Problem • Exploring the Problem • Tackling the Problem II. The Middle School Student . 16 • Taking my Students Seriously • Understanding What my Students Need • Meeting my Students’ Unique Needs • Promoting Diversity Among my Students • Finding a Starting Point for my Students • Examining myself for my Students’ Sakes III. The Middle School Classroom . 36 • Trust in the Classroom • Talk in the Classroom • Time in the Classroom • A Classroom Model of Time and Timing • The Risks of an Uncomfortable Classroom • The Self-Evaluating Classroom Setting IV. The Middle School Curriculum . 63 • A Confrontational Curriculum ii • A Thematic Curriculum • A Well-Planned Curriculum of Confusion • A Broader, More Inclusive Curriculum V. The Middle School Role . 86 • The Role of Evaluation in Middle School and Beyond • The Role Middle Schools Can Play in Defining Proficiency • The Re-visionary Role of the Middle School Teacher Appendices . 101 Works Cited . 107 iii We are told there is a literacy crisis in the United States. Nearing the end of the twentieth century, we have still not succeeded in educating a full literate citizenry, a goal that was articulated by our founding fathers and that motivated the creation of what is probably the most inclusive public education system in the world. --Lauren B. Resnick I. The Middle School Problem: It was the year 1986 when cable television boxes sprouted at the end of many driveways in the rural Ohio neighborhood where I grew up. Already accustomed to my own weekly slate of TV watching (The Cosby Show through Cheers on Thursdays, for example), I never cared much what these additional channels offered, although I joined my younger siblings some evenings for Nick at Nite, or a Disney channel movie. MTV hadn’t monopolized adolescent viewership yet, and at first I thought of the round-the-clock music video offerings as just a visual component to radio-listening. I was never hooked by this culture as a sixteen-year-old, and I can tell my students now that I actually remember and possessed record players and cassette tapes, rabbit-ear antennas, and typewriters. I trace the inspiration for my professional pursuits as a middle school language arts teacher back to 1982 and my own seventh-grade language arts teacher. I left Miss Schuller’s classroom with the sense that teaching and learning were fun because we read and we wrote, all of us. We laughed and learned together. We even made group decisions such as what books Miss Schuller would read aloud and how we might rewrite the endings. My memories of this time are indistinct-- I can recall but a few book titles and activities-- yet I still have powerful impressions of the experience. I can picture Miss Schuller reading aloud dramatically, her desk piled with our writing journals, my own pencil to paper in that journal, and the activity at the chalkboard and our clusters of desks. I do not remember boredom, busy work, or a workbook of any kind. They were there, but as supplemental materials. My experiences in this sort of a classroom became the backdrop for my own idea of what it would be like to teach English myself. I remember Miss Schuller as an excellent teacher for her thirty-year career. I also know that she and many of her peers remember my generation, the students they taught in the early 1980’s, as “the last best.” Coincidentally, my husband’s high school teachers talk the same way, complaining that subsequent groups of students didn’t seem to care; they, teachers and students, could neither bond nor connect at the same level. Year after year it became clearer that students had changed in some way, their attitudes, their expectations, their brains. And while not less 2 intelligent by all accounts, they were certainly less attuned. “If anything,” a mentoring colleague of mine conceded, “they just don’t, won’t, or can’t listen as well as students used to” (Pettitt). In the latter years of their careers, these experienced and innovative teachers had discovered what Jane Healy describes in her pioneering 1990 book Endangered Minds: Why Our Children Don’t Think. Throughout her study of the changing modern student, Healy interviewed numerous veteran teachers of young people who spoke over and over of students who were “likable, fun to be with, intuitive, and often amazingly self-aware, [who] seemed, nonetheless, harder to teach, less attuned to verbal material, both spoken and written” (13). I began my own teaching career in the early nineties, expecting to teach the sort of student I was, and my first students proved a rude awakening. I knew instinctively that the generational gap between my students and me was made wider by the distance between their 1990’s world and mine. The development of their brains and patterns of speech had been fostered by a new technological information age that I had barely witnessed in its emergence. Dr. Healy makes a bold claim, confirmed and accepted in the past decade since the publication of Endangered Minds, of the dramatically “changing brains” among students today, due to the rapidly accelerating nature of communication, which is increasingly passive in nature as a result of its ease and convenience. The discrepancy between “traditional” education and the brains/needs of young learners today is clear to most teachers. And regardless of the explanation offered for this state of affairs, capable veteran teachers attest to “‘watering down,’” “‘modifying,’” and “‘walking through,’” material they have taught for years (Healy 14). This has subsequently raised the fear that we teachers of reading and writing may not know how to teach this new type of student to master skills and content, to process, rely upon, or even benefit from the learning that does take place. Sadly, these fears settle on not only those of disenfranchised circumstances or those who forego a college degree, but also those filling our colleges. They have met basic skills required by state proficiency tests and have “tested” well. Yet in cross-disciplinary studies of college sophomores designed to test “transferable understanding”-- what remains when “the circumstances of testing are slightly altered”-- students repeatedly failed to demonstrate competency (Gardner 6). This inability of today’s college students, presumably the educated elite, to make real use of basic skills and acquired knowledge in multiple settings, is alarming. 3 The whole debate about “teaching to the test” seems out of place when “genuine understanding” has not been achieved, even among the most “literate” (Gardner 6). Instead, educators need to consider what sorts of learners we want to produce and what quality of learners we actually are producing. Having determined what we hope for, we need to ask whether the schools we have now and the teachers in them are capable of reassessing the students, resources, and even curricular standards if necessary, to meet the complex individual needs of our students within an increasingly complicated culture. Alongside these big questions, we need to consider more practically what the isolated, unsupported teacher can do to move in the right direction for his or her students, with the greater vision for improving the quality of learning one classroom at a time. Acknowledging the Problem: Consider the expectations of our public school system as described by Margaret Gallego and Sandra Hollingsworth in What Counts as Literacy: Challenging the School Standard for a “school-based conception of literacy” beyond the simple mastery of standard English: Students who have mastered school literacy (as the ability to read and write standard English) are supposed to develop into a society of adult citizens who are “innovative, achievement oriented, productive, cosmopolitical, media and politically aware, more globally (nationally and internationally) and less locally- oriented, with more liberal and human social attitudes, less likely to commit a crime, and more likely to take education, and the rights and duties of citizenship, seriously.” (qtd. in Gallego and Hollingsworth 6) Citing Harvey Graff from The Literacy Myth, Gallego and Hollingsworth explore various theories as to why “these claims have clearly not been achieved,” including the “hidden purpose” of a dominant social structure, or more innocently, the “sociopolitically determined standard [English] language bias” (7).
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