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Marsha Pincus’s website

Playing with the possible and the second stage

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What moves are teacher- writers making when they engage in inquiry and go public with practice?

  • Consider implicit stances.
  • What are they making visible? How?

She used a “what if” question, then constructed a class to explore if the kind of community she was looking for would emerge through the dissonance that she created for herself and students. In some ways, she was constructing this with students. Marsha starts with this “dissonance” frame she has engaged with throughout her career.

I love the different methods she included to get different perspectives: Reflective conversation and Quaker style meetings replaced debates. Group journals which students read and responded to each other’s reactions to books stories and plays replaced individual literature journals. Collaborative dramatic re-enactments of texts replaced individual oral presentations. p. 4

One of us was actually IN the class (as a student) that Marsha is writing about. This raised some issues and dilemmas for us: Are the voices of students missing in some ways? How can we be sure we are representing students and classrooms in the best ways? We have to remember that these may be from the teachers’ perspectives and acknowledge that.

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What moves are teacher- writers making when they engage in inquiry and go public with practice?

  • Consider implicit stances.
  • What are they making visible? How?

Documentary building

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Cynthia Ballenger’s piece in The Reading Teacher

Reframing the achievement gap: Lessons from puzzling students

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What moves are teacher- writers making when they engage in inquiry and go public with practice?

  • Consider implicit stances.
  • What are they making visible? How?

Great point about the cultural styles of a school to explore narratives of differences and otherness rather than what are the traditional school-based expectations.

What counts? Who counts/ matters? I like the emphasis on increasing the level of respect for students’ ideas and greater understanding to honor important participation when engaging with books.

An implicit (maybe explicit?) stance that I see Ballenger is respect for where the student is in their understanding. As described in the article, understanding looks different for people (because of their culture or because of their way of seeing the world). I think she makes a good inquiry about how we as teachers often have a clear idea of what we want to see in terms of responses and understanding. In order to respect students understanding, we have to deconstruct our expectations and try to understand why they are saying what they are.

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What moves are teacher- writers making when they engage in inquiry and go public with practice?

  • Consider implicit stances.
  • What are they making visible? How?

I notice, not just about this one, but many, a focus on individual students. They are both unique but can teach us some “universal” things through close examination.

I appreciate particularly the way the teacher keeps asking questions to reframe the interactions. She tries a new perspective in which the student may have a purposeful reason for his thinking. Rather than applying a deficit model to her student, she allows herself to be influenced by him. She further includes other teachers in the process to expand their thinking together.

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Excerpt from Cynthia Ballenger’s book, Puzzling Moments, Teaching Moments

Introduction

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What moves are teacher- writers making when they engage in inquiry and go public with practice?

  • Consider implicit stances.
  • What are they making visible? How?

I think it is explicit discrimination to say immigrant students, LS students, the “disruptive” students, the bad seeds… cannot think as critically as their peers. Some teachers justify “their failures” or just lack of knowledge in engaging and fostering growth for “these difficult students.”

I’m wondering about prioritizing a teacher’s deficit perspective of students. On one hand, it makes visible ideas that teachers may not always say aloud (or too loudly). And it putting these ideas on the table, the author can challenge them. On the other hand, these ideas are given life. They’re revoiced. So, there’s a tension here. We have to name these ideas...but in do so we repeat them and keep them in existence.

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NWP blog post by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

Dangerous discussions: Voice and power in my classroom

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What moves are teacher- writers making when they engage in inquiry and go public with practice?

  • Consider implicit stances.
  • What are they making visible? How?

This teacher uses quotes from students with pseudonyms to set up the problem and line of inquiry she is examining. She includes the story of why she held the initial Socratic Seminar in the first place, which exemplifies the damaging power relations in the school more broadly that she was trying to tackle.

While we might not have stories of this magnitude, I can definitely think of socratic seminars or more informal discussions that have gone awry due to my lack of planning and foresight. This teacher also resonates with me, because she is not claiming to have “fixed” anything with one change in practice (the writing or publishing). She still has lines of inquiry that she is working on.

I see this teacher/writer starting with a teaching moment that makes her cringe. Without letting self-deprecation distract or take over, she is using herself as the example of what trap NOT to fall into. This makes her strategy (revision) seem invaluable, and her final beat more urgent/persuasive (“professions of equality and opportunity, no matter how well intentioned, do not make it so” )

This teachers inquiry is “sticky” because of the powerful and authentic use of student voice. Their teacher research is also sticky because they take risk and make visible their struggles and strategies that they used to address a wicked problem.

I am mortified to admit that I dove headlong into this discussion without the care and planning it required. “

I am thinking a lot about how often we dive into discussions without the necessary planning...and how dangerous this mode of teaching can be for students. As a White teacher, I recognize that I have been guilty of this (more times than I’d like to admit). I am also thinking about another PhilWPer who uses her stories and work with students to caution, and I appreciate this line of inquiry...especially when teachers, like this one, attempt to “get it right.”

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What moves are teacher- writers making when they engage in inquiry and go public with practice?

  • Consider implicit stances.
  • What are they making visible? How?

This is a really small thing, but I love when teachers include images of their classrooms in addition to other artifacts. It helped to see this image and also have direct quotes and written responses from students.

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What moves are teacher- writers making when they engage in inquiry and go public with practice?

  • Consider implicit stances.
  • What are they making visible? How?

I really appreciated the method of how the educator outlined her process to give voice to marginalized students to change the discourse at the school around race.

The author makes visible that unstructured class discussions can reproduce societal hierarchies.

Quiet students have ideas, and gathering them through writing can amplify them.

These conversations are vital- metaphors include “collaborative oxygen” and “suffocate.”

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What moves are teacher- writers making when they engage in inquiry and go public with practice?

  • Consider implicit stances.
  • What are they making visible? How?
  • Tells us something she’s intrigued by
  • Sets context, mentions meeting/event when something was sparked/kick started
  • Describes that she wasn’t alone: other teachers were involved
  • Wrote what she was nervous about...excited about…confident about...
  • Described school, students, etc. [This is something I always wonder / worry about...how do I describe my school and students? What do I choose to focus on? What do I leave out?
  • Uses a story format with timing
  • “In theory, I already knew…” and later, “The real work, however…” → signals a shift in her thinking and knowledge
  • She’s building some theory for us: “students interacted with and also acted upon the world” (p. 3)
  • She shares questions that emerged from the work (p. 4)

1) I was struck by the moment toward the end of page 3 when she compares her previous knowledge/understanding of the power of teaching drama with the actual power that was unfolding.

2) Then I loved the strategy of list of bulleted questions that follow. And then 3) The narrative/meta- moment of coming back from Alaska to share cultural fears with her current students.

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What moves are teacher- writers making when they engage in inquiry and go public with practice?

  • Consider implicit stances.
  • What are they making visible? How?
  • Includes video of students as well as herself talking in an interview
  • Organized on different pages for tighter focus
  • Data: student work, classroom video, her own journal reflections, interview transcripts and video
  • Draws upon the “within, beyond, and against” framework in describing her work
  • Acknowledges district structures but only implicitly challenges them (I think)