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Dixie Goswami and Peter R. Stillman, eds. Reclaiming the Classroom: Teacher Research as an Agency for Change . Upper Montclair: Boynton/Cook, 1987. 342 pp. Paperbound, $8.60.
“BUT WE don't need to reclaim our classrooms,” we may say as college and university teachers, and put this book down. For the volume addresses secondary and primary school teachers who often experience themselves as helpless “consumers” of knowledge they have no power to make—who are not really in charge of their classrooms because they are not really in charge of what they teach or of how they should teach it. ”Teachers have been trained as doers of other people's directions” (22). As college teachers we tend to feel that we are completely in charge: we can make the knowledge we teach and we can scorn curriculum specialists and “university experts” who might try to tell us how we should teach. (I sometimes wonder if we are as fully in charge as we like to think, but let that pass. “I thank you Lord that I am not like other men. …”)
But as a corollary of our sense of autonomy, we are even more prey than schoolteachers are to a serious problem that this book also addresses: a pervasive assumption that classrooms are for the telling or giving of knowledge—from the teachers who have it to the students who don't. For some reason it feels natural to equate higher education with lecturing. This book could be summarized as a diverse gathering of suggestions for turning our classrooms into areas of shared inquiry. The book comes back again and again to the realization of teachers that their students don't really learn much till they “own” some of the questions. Though the book's main theme is teachers doing research, a powerful subtheme is teachers collaborating with students.
If we searched our memories for our best teaching moments, most of us would probably come up with moments when we've been learning along with our students, when our classrooms felt like a place of shared inquiry, not telling. But for many reasons, this learning climate is hard to come by. Goswami and Stillman offer many practical and interesting suggestions to help us produce it more often. The main point is that when we take on a piece of classroom research, we are thrust into the stance of learner, not of knowing authority. And it is our stance as teacher that makes the biggest difference in the climate. Betty Bailey remarks that when she is engaged in a piece of classroom research,
I work with my students in a very different way. Instead of dominating the class … I really have to step back so that they can produce “data” for me to look at. I can't be running the show because I can't be looking when I'm running the show. (163)
(It is important to note, by the way, that the suggestions for research are not just about teaching but also about the subject matter—not just about literature and writing instruction but about issues in literature and writing.)
I have learned from Dixie Goswami to make heavy use in my graduate and undergraduate teaching of one of the cornerstones of classroom research, the case study—a hard look at a small sample. I often ask my students to write case studies of themselves and of someone else. The case study can be of someone as a writer (over the years or for the semester or even for the time it took the writer to produce just one piece of writing). Or a case study can be of someone as reader, or talker, or persuader. (Case studies have long been used in other disciplines such as history, law, business, architecture.) The case study invites students to work out their own knowledge, not just learn my knowledge or someone else's. Yes, I try to get my knowledge and that of the “authorities” into the air as much as I can through reading and discussion. But students must develop fresh conclusions about the issue we are studying in the most integrated way possible—in terms of their own experience and that of someone else. Students become interested in reading each other's case studies. I find that the specificity of case studies gives them the authority not necessarily to overthrow but at least to make us all question the conclusions that I or some published authority starts out believing. Case studies increase the chances that students reach their own conclusions—and thus become more invested in what they learn.
Here is another example of someone using the book's approach in a college classroom. In one section of her course my colleague Fran Zak commented on student papers as she always does; in the other section she gave no criticism or correction of any sort—just praise for what worked; or acknowledgment of what seemed a move in the right direction; or nonjudgmental reflections on what the student was saying (“I read your paper as an extended meditation on. …”); or some of her own thoughts about the topic (“What interests me about this issue is …”). This piece of classroom research has given her more excitement and renewal in her teaching (and in her thinking about writing) than she's had in many years of naturally enthusiastic teaching.
Her “methodology” illustrates the help this book provides. That is, Goswami and Stillman show us that it's all right to use what some would call a loose or undisciplined approach. Fran Zak didn't define all the elements of the experiment beforehand or carefully define the kinds of comment she would make—other than to say that she would give criticism and advice to one class and would give mostly praise to the other. She wasn't trying to produce airtight results, she was engaged in inquiry. She didn't try to control for all the variables or guard against “experimenter expectations.” (The students, however, didn't know they were part of an experiment.) She didn't frame a careful hypothesis ahead of time. The impetus of the experiment was simply her weariness at all the criticizing and correcting—and a gnawing suspicion that they were not really doing any good.
But she wasn't just fooling around either. She engaged in careful and disciplined observation. She kept an extraordinarily full diary of her perceptions and reactions throughout the semester. And she kept copies of all the writing by five more or less representative students from each class. Now Zak is engaged in looking more carefully at those papers and trying to analyze the comments she wrote on them. On the basis of her rough subjective sense of all the writing in the two classes—and on her careful examination of the ten students' writing—she cannot see that all her criticizing, correcting, and suggesting made the writing in the nonexperimental section any better. This is not to say she found the other kind of feedback easy, but she did find it more satisfying to try to give. (“The positive reinforcement has bounced off the kids and come back to me,” she wrote one night in her journal.) An experiment like this does not prove anything, but it is enough to make us sit up and wonder—and to suggest a line of future research.
In short, the book disengages the idea of “research” from the positivist model of “proving” things with large N s and control groups. It suggests a notion that is more epistemologically modest—more akin to the style of research we use in literature: look as hard and carefully as you can at the data; try to keep the data as public as possible—to help you or others to reexamine it; and simply try to reach conclusions that are persuasive but usefully debatable. Yet the book also disengages the idea of research from the humanist's model of scholarship: one person sitting silent and alone in a library. The characteristic features of classroom research are disciplined observation of events in the world and collaboration with other observers.
The book does not, however, try to suggest a single or right model for research. Rather, it provides a spectrum with examples of very informal research at one end, and at the other an extended essay by an eminent professional researcher (Lee Odell), who gives many specific suggestions for more rigorous and methodologically self-conscious ways of setting up classroom research.
The book is a rich mixture of theory and practice. Let me just mention a few of the pieces I particularly appreciated:
Ann Berthoff speaks of the relation between observation and generalization (which she shows is about the nature of theory and practice). We all experience some of the things we do as “working” and others not—and some of our colleagues as consistently more successful in their teaching than we are. But we don't know why. We need theory. Yet if we turn to published theory about teaching, we are seldom rewarded. We need to work out our own theory—but not just by sitting there and thinking hard or spinning out theories on paper. We need methods for more sustained and disciplined observing. What is really going on during the successful times and the unsuccessful times? It is this process of observing that Berthoff—and the whole book—give us help with.
Shirley Brice Heath (recent MacArthur Award winner) summarizes her extensive and important research on the different patterns of literacy learning in various ethnic and socioeconomic communities—and how these patterns of literacy behaviors fit or don't fit what schools ask of children. She describes how she made use of teacher researchers as part of this decades-long project.
Dale Lumley explores the problem of students who cannot connect with the texts he is trying to teach. He shows how private dialogue journals lead to kinds of thinking that don't go on in discussion and that, eventually, help those students move closer to connecting with the texts.
Lucinda Ray shows the difference between thinking intelligently about her conferences with students (but not getting out of a rut) and observing them in a disciplined way. It wasn't till she taped her conferences and listened to the tapes that she could really understand what was going on and—more to the point—make important changes in her teaching.
There are other reasons why this book may interest college and university faculty members. In recent years there has been a fuzzing of the line between “subject matter” (writing and literature) and the process of “learning the subject matter.” I'm thinking of the interest in reader-response theory, reception theory, and other developments in critical theory. Thus, this book can help faculty members think of kinds of research that could count as legitimate scholarship in a way that would have been impossible ten years ago. Besides, many university teachers are bored, teaching the same thing over and over, not doing much writing or publication because they feel locked into what they see as their “field.” The research suggested here will help teachers begin to break out of their fields as narrowly defined. Finally, classroom research will help faculty members do some of the things that the Carnegie Commission calls for in order to revitalize higher education.
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
© 1987 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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