Invitations and Negotiations

By Marie LeJeune, Ph.D. & Tracy Smiles, Ph.D., Western Oregon University

Image of children reading

Like many of you who work with (or who are) graduate students, this is a busy time of year for us. We’re in the mad rush of the last few weeks before graduate theses are due for spring graduation and spending many hours working alongside graduate students on their research, analysis and writing. This is work we both dearly love, not only for all we see it teaching the action researchers we work with, but for all it teaches us as readers, writers, and researchers. One of our latest lessons and “aha moments”? How vital — yet slippery — claiming a theoretical framework can be for many teachers and beginning researchers. Recently we worked with a graduate student who claimed she didn’t have a theoretical framework to base her research on, even though she had a detailed research question, methodology, and data analysis plan already in place. She was working with middle school students on authentic vocabulary and language based practices and planned to incorporate rich literature selections and readalouds to investigate its impact upon students’ vocabulary growth. Trying to push her towards reflecting on the “whys” of her project—the theoretical framework she was operating from, Marie asked her (anticipating her reply), “Well if you’re working on developing vocabulary with kids why aren’t you simply doing the practices you said your principal has been encouraging, like ‘word of the day’ and vocab packets with worksheets?” Our graduate student gave us a stricken glance and said, “Well, because I would never use such inauthentic literacy practices!”

We nodded and told her, “See … you do have a theoretical framework — a belief system you’re operating from. Now you need to go back and work on the reading and writing that will help you articulate that in your research.”

This is just one small scenario that reminds us of how important it is to remember and reflect upon the theories and philosophical beliefs that guide us as teachers and researchers. This month, we’d like to explore these issues — how our theoretical beliefs combine with both our research-based practices (pedagogy) and our choice of rich, culturally authentic literature (texts) to provide a praxis that we operate from as literacy teachers and researchers.

As teachers and teacher educators who are informed by literary reader based theory, socio-cultural perspectives on literacy learning and teaching and who engage in literature based/student centered instruction, we have been inspired with the possibilities multi-cultural and international literature offer for critical explorations of social justice and global issues. However, we have also found that when we open up spaces for literature discussion and response, we can’t anticipate how the reader will respond to a text. For instance, students may respond in limited and hegemonic ways to texts we perceived as offering rich possibilities for inquiry into personal, social, and political questions. In this month’s blog posts, we will illustrate both the transformative pedagogy we have experienced through sharing a framework that involves multicultural literature, reader centered literary theories, and response based pedagogy as well as the professional struggles we (and other teachers) have experienced as we attempt to “nudge” students towards a more critical perspective on texts, readers, and the world.

“A curriculum is a prediction concerning how people learn, what people should be learning, and the contexts that will support that learning” (Short and Burke, 1991, p. 33). This framework reflects a mixture of our past experiences as literacy teachers, teacher researchers, and teacher educators, and our current perspectives on literary and pedagogical theories and how they might play out in practice. In short, this reflects our predictions regarding students, texts, and possibilities for engagement.

During the month of May we will share data from classroom engagements with multicultural and international literature with students from a variety of age levels in various contexts.

Moje, E. (2002). Re-framing adolescent literacy research for new-times: Studying youth as a resource. Reading Research and Instruction, 41, 211-228.

Short, K. & Burke, C. (1991). Creating curriculum: Teachers and students as a community of learners. Portmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Journey through Worlds of Words during our open reading hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

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2 thoughts on “Invitations and Negotiations

  1. What a perfect story to explain a theoretical framework! I see this as an example of the current educational system’s deskilling of classroom teachers. We can debate whether it is purposeful or unintentional, but I don’t think many would argue that teachers feel empowered in today’s climate. The more administrators and teacher educators help teachers realize that their philosophical and pedagogical beliefs do, in fact, shape their instruction, perhaps it will lead to advocacy to voice their perspectives about the Race to the *Top* and other misguided educational *reforms.*

    Your work is appreciated!

  2. Steve Wojcikiewicz says:

    Great story – I think it emphasizes that, for teacher educators, teaching about various educational theories may be the second step, one we can only take after we show our students they they are indeed already thinking and acting according one or more theoretical frameworks. When people ask “how can theory affect practice?”, one answer, it appears, is to “nudge” them toward the realization that there is no practice without at least an implicit theory behind it. Such a realization is an essential part of a critical stance. I look forward to seeing how your theoretical frameworks manifest themselves in practice.

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