It’s Emotional: An English Teacher’s Journey In a New Classroom
By Elizabeth Benton
Elizabeth Benton serves as the English and Reading Department Chair at Montgomery College, Rockville. Elizabeth has been a Montgomery College faculty member since 2004. Elizabeth has been the English and Reading Department Chair since 2012. Elizabeth teaches courses in English composition, grammar, distance learning, American literature, and ELITE professional development. Elizabeth is a doctoral candidate at The George Washington University in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development.
Several community colleges across the country and in Maryland have created inclusion models to accelerate developmental students who place at the pre-college level into credit-level course work. One such model is the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), a model conceived at the Community College of Baltimore County in 2007.[1][2][3] The ALP model includes linking developmental and credit level English course work as opposed to the old stepping stone model. In essence, teachers spend three credit hours with students per week in the English composition course and three hours a week in the developmental course work module, with the modular class meeting just after the credit level English class. The English composition course in the ALP model consists of a heterogeneous class of developmental and credit-level students. The only students who remain for the ALP module are the developmental students. The composition of the class includes eight developmental students and 12 college-ready students.
At this point in the development of the various inclusion models, much of the research emphasis is on student retention and completion.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10] However, little attention is paid to the teacher’s lived experience[11] in this new and highly scrutinized model. Therefore, I conducted this small-scale study to better understand how community college English teachers experience the new
inclusion models. I entered this research study with a colleague from a nearby community college, intending to uncover the intricacies of a community college teacher’s professional journey during a decade of reform. What I discovered instead was quite different: that the experience of teaching is emotional as much as it is intellectual. Although the study taught me about her college’s classroom reform model and her role in conceptualizing and facilitating it, the study taught both of us to more deeply consider the meaning of what teachers do and who we are.
In some course work I have completed, I was introduced to key theorists who study teachers. Most notably, I looked at Palmer and Scribner’s literature on identity, Grumet’s text on feminism and teaching, Noddings’s work on teacher care, and Dewey’s and Rogers and Freiberg’s work around classroom strategies and student motivation.[12][13][14][15][16] The notion of teacher identity emerges in Palmer and Scribner’s work when they urge teachers to remember ourselves: “If I can remember the inner pluralism of my own soul… I will be better to serve the pluralism among my students at the pace of their young lives…. By remembering ourselves, we remember our students.”[17] They go on to address the teacher’s temptation to show students what he/she knows rather than teach students what they need to know. They claim this charade masks a deep fear in many of us of being seen, being weak, as we fear we are. In seeking remembrances of our own identity, we know ourselves better and thus become “better teachers.”[18]
Similarly, Grumet explains that leaving the self out of the teaching situation is a mistake at best.[19] Grumet suggests awareness of one’s own identity cannot be removed from the equation of teaching. In denying “our own experience and our own knowledge,”[20] we are “complicit” with theories that “silence” our journey and “histories” and our work in education.[21] Grumet further contends that “knowledge evolves in human relationships.”[22] Grumet finds that running the classroom like a “conveyance”[23] does not guide children toward a space of learning and growth. She focuses much of her attention on women and teaching; however, the application of her words transcends gender, prompting teachers to seek to know the identity of the self and the other.
Another important strand in studying the teacher’s experience in a new curriculum is understanding the teacher’s experience of the relational component of crafting and adapting to a new model. For this study, I found immediate resonance in Noddings’s work on an ethic of care and Palmer and Scribner’s work on collaborative relationships in education.[24][25][26][27][28] Noddings claims that caring relations are attentive, responsive, and ongoing. By being attentive to the person, the “carer” directs energy away from “her own projects” toward the cared for.[29] This action and emotion opens the self to the other and requires the teacher to bracket his/her own learning and knowing in an effort to listen to another’s point of view. Noddings also suggests that the relationship between the carer and the cared for must be reciprocal and ongoing. For the relation to exist, the cared for must respond, showing that the caring relation has been received.[30] Finally, the roles cared-for and carer are not permanent; instead, they are “names for roles accepted in encounters.”[31] For this present study, I wanted to see more clearly how care played a role in the teacher’s experience with her peers, administrators, and students.
Palmer and Scribner suggest “collegial discourse” provides a community of teachers with “cumulative and collective wisdom” for their teaching.[32] They urge collaboration among teachers: “teachers can lose a sponge or amputate the wrong limb with no witness”[33] except for students in the classroom. Palmer and Scribner suggest a form of “critical moments dialogue”[34] as a formal way to institutionalize faculty collaboration: It starts with discussions and it leads to entering the other’s classroom space to observe and offer guidance where needed. In reflecting on Noddings’s and Palmer and Scribner’s work, I saw that the literature on teachers experiencing a caring environment and collaborative one is largely missing in the current inclusion model literature. This finding further compelled me to ask at least one teacher the meaning she came to know in the inclusion model at her community college.
Finally, for years I have wandered the long and winding road of understanding who the teacher is and how her internal motivation to support student success manifests in the classroom. The fourth and final prong of the study, therefore, considered the pedagogical design of the new curricular model, drawing on Dewey’s and Rogers and Freiberg’s views regarding the relatedness of learning by experience and the student’s knowledge acquisition.[35][36] Dewey claims that teachers should engage “his (the student’s) activities”[37] in a manner that exists on an “experiential continuum.”[38] Respect between teacher and student drives the learning process rather than the model of teacher as keeper (and giver) of knowledge. In a more shared, even democratic relation, or as Dewey names it, “the principle of regard for individual freedom and
Heart Prism 2 by Lazur Urh CCBY 4.0
for decency and kindliness of human relations,”[39] the teacher shares time and space with the students, supporting them with instructional strategies designed to meet their needs.
Similarly, in the field of education psychology, Rogers and Freiberg assert that “meaningful, experiential learning has relevance to the whole person.”[40] Rogers and Freiberg’s work in psychology and their view that the individual strives for “personal growth, autonomy, and freedom from control by external forces”[41] coincides with the teacher’s role in delivering motivational practices to her students. Rogers and Freiberg suggest that thinking the teacher can motivate is erroneous and contradictory to human intrinsic motivation. Instead, they assert: “it is our task as facilitators of learning to tap that motivation, to discover what challenges are real for the young person and to provide the opportunity for him to meet those challenges.”[42] In this way, the teacher connects to the learner in multifaceted ways, finding ways to support learning and the student’s sense of accomplishment that comes with it.
This qualitative study set out to “construct a possible interpretation of the nature of a certain human experience”[43] and give voice to a teacher’s journey to experience her practice in a community college English composition classroom made up of heterogeneous learners. The study included two in depth interviews[44] with one participant Sarah[45], a faculty member who teaches in the Accelerated Learning Program at a small mid-Atlantic community college. Two interviews were conducted by phone for approximately forty-five minutes each.
Once each interview was completed and transcribed, I began memoing and coding to begin the data analysis.[46] From there, I categorized the data into themes[47] that led to greater conceptualization of the research. Throughout the process, I revisited my data, analyzing it and coding it at different levels until I felt I had reached a saturation point. I engaged the participant in discussing the paper and sent her the final draft.
The findings of this study are not what I expected, but not altogether surprising. I sensed that teacher identity, care, collaboration, and motivational strategies would undergird the teacher’s experience. I did not know, however, to what extent my participant’s experiences in the classroom paralleled her experience with faculty peers and administrators. The favorable way she described her experience as a teacher in the ALP classroom often mirrored the way she engaged with administrators and faculty peers. She also experienced the same care and support in the classroom with her students that she experienced from administrators. She modeled for her students the collaboration she felt with her peers. The motivation she gained from positive experiences with colleagues and administrative leaders were also reflected in her classroom techniques.
Finding #1: Experiencing Care
Sarah explained the process of engaging in the development of the ALP model as a faculty initiative that she and her colleague embarked upon several years ago. As the English composition coordinator, Sarah saw the significant gaps between developmental and credit-level English, noting that developmental students “were having… abysmal retention rates and pass rates and I knew it was demoralizing.” Shortly after attending an ALP conference, Sarah and her colleague applied for and received grant funding to redesign their college’s English composition course and to implement ALP at their college. When they won the grant, they were given “an inordinate amount of trust…” from administrators. Sarah noted that as trust grew between administrators and faculty, administrators realized they could trust faculty more. Sarah explained that administrators realized “(when) you trust faculty, they can do really great things.” As a matter of fact, since the creation of the faculty-led ALP and English composition redesign, other departments have developed their own projects that were supported by administrators.
In another way, trust had to be established during the redesign among faculty colleagues. When Sarah first introduced the redesign efforts to colleagues, there was “a level of real mistrust especially among some of the adjunct faculty who thought that this was about finding out who was a… bad teacher.” To this day, she makes a concerted effort to assure that the redesign efforts and subsequent data that inform it are used to “build up the department.” She explains trust is something that is a “never-ending thing” and must be tended to for the program and department to be successful and effective for students.
In her classroom, Sarah recognizes the need to invest in the students’ lives, to understand who they are beyond their essay writing. Sarah realizes the students she sees are “my community.” The people in her class are the people of her community, whom she sees at the bank and the grocery store and the students who will take care of her as she ages. By investing in the lives of her students, she strengthens the student’s sense of her willingness to teach them. During the ALP module, she has come to know that students have “educational gaps.” However, rather than chock these gaps up as learning deficits solely (though sometimes they are), she learns the gaps are “life gaps,” not educational ones. She discovers that many of the gaps have been caused by having a baby in high school and dropping out or missing school, being incarcerated for up to ten to fifteen years, or other life situations. By caring and “knowing why that gap in their education and in their knowledge is there, it makes it easier to figure out what would be most helpful for them…” She sees who they are and what they need. In her classroom, her emotions do not direct how she feels about her students. Her emotions direct how and what she teaches them.
Finding #2: Teacher Collaboration
Sarah finds she and her colleagues experience a “huge amount of collaboration.” The tone of their department is one of shared resources, shared work, and shared experiences. Sarah is elated to find “presents,” in the form of assignment sheets, rubrics, or other classroom tools in her faculty box or on the Blackboard collaborative faculty site. One faculty wrote in an email, “Hey, I found this really cool article, and I’m going to use it in my class today. I made copies, and I put them in all your boxes.” Sarah explains this type of sharing is a part of the fabric of her department.
The collaborative spirit of the faculty relates directly to her students: “I think, as a result of the collaboration of the faculty, when I’m explaining things to students… I say ‘we put this assignment together.’” The students know that “all of their peers in other classes are doing pretty much the same thing.” In turn, students in various classes have the opportunity to work together. Within the classroom, Sarah assigns course work in the ALP module that is collaborative in nature. As a scaffolding assignment toward a larger independent project, Sarah has the students write a reader response assignment as a whole class activity. She actually leaves the room and tells the students she will return shortly. Students work through two to three revisions before she will accept the work. Once complete, she moves them from the collaborative to the independent. This part of the class serves several purposes: it creates a community of learners and it influences students to complete the next phase of the assignment as independent learners.
Finally, Sarah portrays the collaborative spirit with her students when she incorporates their questions and concerns into lessons and assignment modifications. In one example, the students were given an assignment in the English composition class that the ALP students found problematic. When she walked into to the ALP module, students interrupted before she could start the lesson: “We were talking during the break and we think maybe if we did this on this day, instead of (that) day….” Sarah’s response to me in the interview was, “I work with that, and that’s completely fine. I’m open to working with them to develop their writing but also to kind of let them have ownership of the class.” By listening to her students, the teacher facilitates a collaborative classroom structure.
Finding #3: Teacher Motivation
Sarah and her colleagues are motivated by the success of their students. The assessment report generated by the assessment director, Sarah, and her colleagues shows improvement in her students’ completion rates: “We just got a report for last semester pretty recently. It showed a lot of improvement and so we’re really excited about that… It might be just a fluke, but it might also be a trend.” She recognizes that she and her colleagues have set high standards for themselves and their students, and they are seeing the realization of their goals: “We try to keep our eyes on… getting everything to fall into place, which, I think, is what we’re seeing now.” Sarah recalls a struggling student whom she did not know how to help. Recently, however, the student submitted an essay “that is beautiful.” She does not imagine the student will get a high grade on the assignment, but the student “pulled her ideas together” in a way that inspired Sarah to continue working hard. She describes her work as “walking through wet cement” until the end of the semester when “you get to see the payoff.” Seeing students succeed (even minimally at times), keeps her motivated and returning to the inclusion ALP classroom each semester.
When Sarah discusses motivation, she turns to her course assignments that push students- -individually and collaboratively—to “discover something and to experiment with something” and then “guide them and (give) feedback.” She discusses the standardization of the English composition course in contrast to the experimentation in the ALP module. In the English composition class, the syllabus demands strict guidelines and course requirements. In the ALP module, student motivation is strengthened each time the students try something new—a new type of journal or creative writing, for example—that builds their confidence in who they are. For example, when she has them work collaboratively in the ALP module, they “practice talking out strategies and talking about using resources… and negotiating…” In doing this type of work with the students, she fosters their risk-taking, directs their creativity, and guides their increased written and oral communication skills, key tenets of the English composition course.
Sarah’s comments about empowering students through academic risk-taking were poignant. Even more moving to me was her perspective about the inherent motivation baked in to the ALP model: “They know they’re in a 101 (college-level) class and very early on they recognize without me even telling them that if they really plug in during ALP class, that they’re going to get extra support for what they need.” The confidence they build in ALP supports their academic achievements.
Not a Finding, But…
In my journey with Sarah, I rediscovered the heart of a teacher. Amid the collaborative efforts and shared experiences, within the caring environment of an educator’s classroom and integral to the artful assignments and discussions, Sarah composed a teaching life that exceeded her own expectations. I do not believe she entered the English composition redesign and ALP model of paired credit-level and developmental course work to transform her life. Instead, she wanted to pull the students out of burdensome course work that had little effect and certainly no reward. But in our second interview, something happened: Sarah began reflecting on the meaning of her time in the ALP module. At the end of her lengthy discussion of the rewards of teaching ALP students, she sighed, “boy that sounded really good, didn’t it? I need to say that back to myself sometimes [emphasis added].” In my re-reading of that portion of the interview transcript, I came across my own transformative moment, just a few lines before: “I think I get to know the students really well. That’s really the big thing for me. You’re building a relationship and then allowing that to support instruction and make sure instruction happens.” Aha.
I cannot escape that a teacher’s experience in the inclusion model classroom is an academic endeavor that is not without emotion. In our daily lives as teachers and teacher leaders, we often separate the two, trying desperately to bracket out our own self in an attempt to preserve the objective demands of being a teacher. But when we are faced with more than half of a class of students who are just not “getting it,” we have to consider our whole person as well as theirs. In an effort to create meaningful instruction, do we have to invest ourselves in the lives of our students, their educational and life gaps? Perhaps the inclusion model for developmental student learning is an effective first step toward answering that question.
My time in this research study with Sarah recalibrated my own journey toward teacher identity. Just as she teaches her students to discover and explore, she has learned to explore a new paradigm of teaching. Just as she teaches her students to trust her, she feels entrusted by administrators and takes her own professional risks. Just as she teaches her students to journey together in collaborative work experiences, she participates in and reaps the benefits of an environment of “we,” an environment of carrying each other’s burdens to make bearable the task of teaching struggling learners. In Sarah’s sharing and my interpreting, I experience hope again in education. When days feel like the cement Sarah knows all too well, my journey with her gives me a glimpse into the rewards of life changing teaching and learning.
In our English and reading office, we have a bookshelf chock-full of great books—literature, composition theory, literacy, and creative texts authored by members of our own department faculty. But now, placed on the shelves alongside these important texts are new ones. These new texts on caring, responding to student needs, educational change, mindfulness and joy don’t support our or our students’ intellect. They support us—teachers and students learning together.
End Notes
[1] Peter Adams, et al. “The Accelerated Learning Program,” 50-69.
[2] Peter Adams and Donna McKusick. “Steps and Missteps,” 15-25.
[3] Monica Walker. “Exploring Faculty Perceptions,” 12-34.
[4] Adams et al.
[5] Eric P. Bettinger, et al. “Student Supports,” 93-115.
[6] Complete College America, Remediation.
[7] Adams and McKusick.
[8] Thomas Bailey, et al. “Three Accelerated Developmental Education Programs,” 3-26.
[9] Thomas Bailey, et al. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges.
[10] Hunter R. Boylan and Amy R. Trawick. “Contemporary Developmental Education,” 26-37.
[11] Max Van Mannen, Researching Lived Experience.
[12] Parker J. Palmer and Megan Scribner. The Courage to Teach.
[13] Madeleine Grumet. Bitter Milk.
[14] Nel Nodding. Caring.
[15] John Dewey. Experience and Education.
[16] Carl R. Rogers and Jerome H. Freiberg. Freedom to Learn.
[17] Palmer and Scribner, 25.
[18] Ibid., 29.
[19] Grumet.
[20] Ibid., xvi.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., xix.
[23] Ibid., 20.
[24] Noddings. Caring.
[25] Nel Noddings. a Philosophy of Education.
[26] Nel Noddings. b “The Language Care of Ethics,” 53-56.
[27] Nel Noddings. Education and Democracy.
[28] Palmer and Scribner.
[29] Noddings. b, 53.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Palmer and Scribner, 146.
[33] Ibid., 147.
[34] Ibid., 151.
[35] Dewey.
[36] Rogers and Freiberg.
[37] Dewey, 27.
[38] Ibid., 33.
[39] Ibid., 34.
[40] Rogers and Freiberg, 37.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Van Mannen, 41.
[44] Irving Seidman. Interviewing.
[45] Name changed for anonymity.
[46] John Creswell. Qualitative Inquiry, 184.
[47] John Creswell. Research Design, 199.
Bibliography
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Noddings, Nel. Education and Democracy in the 21st Century. New York: Teachers College Press, 2013.
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