What Does It Mean to Be Literate in This Class? A Teacher-Researcher’s Investigation of Scripted, Thematic, and Improvisational Curricula

• In Event: Practitioner Researchers: Hybrid Roles in the Generation and Use of Research Knowledge

Abstract

Objectives and Significance to the Field

In this era of scripted, “teacher-proof” curricula, using the phrase, “researched-based,” to describe curriculum and instruction has in some ways silenced teachers who, while working within curricular frameworks, struggle with the ways research-based findings make their way into practice. When teachers question, resist or push back, they are treated as if they are uninformed and reminded that the methods are “research-based” and thus not open to questions from practitioners. What is missing is an understanding of how research-based practices play themselves out in classrooms and impact children’s life chances. Taking up the AERA theme “To know is not enough,” I researched what it meant to be literate in my own highly scripted, under-performing urban classroom when students were given multiple points of entry into literate practices.

Perspectives and Analysis

The primary purpose of my study was advocacy for my first grade students and what Denzin and Lincoln (2000) call “enhancing or restoring forward movement” in their literacy development. My research was aimed at understanding how research-based and more emic units of study supported literacy learning. To unpack the differences, I intentionally maintained a set of comparable lesson structures across units of study to examine what my students were invited and enabled to do with language and literacy.
Drawing on a multiple literacies framework (Street, 2003), I began from the perspective that being literate entails more than singular, measureable sets of competencies. Based on analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about ‘critical incidents’ in my classroom, I analyzed differences and similarities in the structures of the mandated curriculum and the more organically developed units of study. Keeping these lesson structures roughly parallel, I examined the affordances these contrasting units provided students for participation and learning, and analyzed the kinds of literate engagement these different experiences made possible.

Data Sources and Findings

This work took place over one school year, focusing on teaching and student engagement during three units of study: the phonics/phonemic awareness component of a scripted language arts program, the reading work entailed in an interdisciplinary thematic unit on sharks, and engagement with cameras and visual literacy in an improvisational photography project bridging school and students’ homes. Data included videotaped lessons and student conversations, lesson plans, related curricula, student work, photographs, student feedback, and field notes.
My analysis revealed that the nature of the children’s literate engagement varied according to the ways students were invited to take up the structures to which they were introduced. The scripted curriculum focused students’ attention on language form and behaviors rather than content and invited replication or mirroring. With content-focused curricula, although intentionally structured in ways parallel to the scripted curriculum, students engaged more readily with ideas, thereby enriching content knowledge and language. In the photography work, students pushed against the boundaries of expected structures. Given room to innovate with the structures of their own making, the improvisational photography project yielded enriched literacy and language development wherein children generated meaning for their own purposes.

Author

• Rebecca Akin, Oakland Unified School District