After reading Leila Christenbury's Retracing the Journey and the articles for this week's class, I have bee thinking about the differences between what people (teachers, students, administrators, policy makers, etc.) think should happen in the ELA classroom and what actually occurs. Franzak's article "On the Margins" discusses the discrepancies between inscribed policies and the policies-in-action as well as the teacher-created phantom policies. Policy is enacted through people, so different ideologies and beliefs affect the way that the policy becomes realized in the classroom. The teacher is a kind of filter between the policy itself and the students and classroom practice. Teachers can sometimes even take on subversive roles as they refuse to comply with certain policies. These teacher reactions can be both good and bad: teachers can use their experience and knowledge of good teaching practices to integrate policies in ways that are most beneficial to the students; on the other hand, teachers sometimes do not know about district policies and may feel resistant without knowing how to implement a policy. Also, as Franzak has shown, sometimes the phantom policies trump the inscribed policies when they do not actually benefit the students. I saw similar phantom policies in my school, especially concerning the reading of "required" texts and the way that literature should be taught. The school also had phantom policies about the type of work that should be required at each level of academic tracking. These policies came from tradition and influential teachers' beliefs rather than from actual policies or any sort of research.
The teaching of reading is interesting to me because I have seen the attitudes (including my own) of English teachers who say that that they don't know how to teach reading. So we end up teaching texts rather than reading skills and strategies, which ends up being less beneficial for students. It is true that not a lot of actual reading goes on in secondary ELA classes because teachers may have different priorities based on those phantom policies (such as cultural knowledge, the value of the canon, etc.)
I'm also interested in students' identities as readers, especially how policy and school practices can put certain identities on kids (like "struggling reader" or "honors student"). How can we, though, give students what they need (additional help with reading skills) without giving them a certain identity?
"What We Know About ELA Teachers" by Scherff and Hahs-Vaughn also discusses the "mismatch" between teachers' expectations and the realities of the classroom. The university is a place of collaboration and support, while the workplace in a high school may not be. The university stresses "constructivist" approaches (Newell, Tallman, and Letcher), but colleagues in an English department may have different approaches and beliefs. Scherff and Hahs-Vaughn argue for preparing new teachers for the reality of the school, but how large a dose of reality should we give? We do not want to scare undergrads away from the profession, and I think a complete picture of teaching might do just that.
The application of activity theory to the early career of a teacher is interesting because new teachers are involved in so many, and often conflicting, contexts and settings. I felt like the context of the school and department started "taking over," and I had to purposely seek out professional development and communities of teachers to encourage the type of teaching that I believed to be best for kids (but that was different from what my colleagues believed to be best). It became a struggle for me to balance the competing contexts.
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