The Culture of Schools

Part of this response was inspired by: Ball, A.F., & Ellis, P. (2008). Identity and the writing of culturally and linguistically diverse students. In C. Bazerman (Ed.), Handbook of research on writing (pp. 499-513). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.

For starters, I have to ask that you all forgive me as I'm a little rusty with blog writing since I had 2 weeks off while I worked on other things. Secondly I have to apologize if this entry is a tad cynical - I hope there's some hope in it somewhere!

As I read the above named chapter, I saw connections to a variety of experiences I've had in the preceding week. I started drafting a response that talked about the connection between the social and contextual nature of developing a cultural identity through writing and New Literacies Studies, but another idea kept niggling at me.

In essence, what I've concluded after reading this chapter (and from interesting conversations I've had throughout the week), is that in order to help culturally & linguistically diverse students develop identities as writers, and pretty much in order for us to effectively teach anything to anyone, we need to first start looking at (and changing!) the culture of schools . If a school culture doesn't value certain theories and practices then all the research in the world on the best ways to develop a writing identity in culturally diverse students will be useless.

In their review of the research, Ball and Ellis (2008) explain that some studies have looked at the teaching environment "and the role it plays in the teaching and learning of writing to students from diverse backgrounds" (p. 506). The author's cite Schneider (2003) who suggests that "teachers should move toward a freer, less constrained classroom setting where students" can study in ways that best suit them (as cited in Ball & Ellis, 2008, p. 506).

This sounds wonderful doesn't it?

I can visualise this wonderful classroom where teachers encourage real social interaction between students so that they can begin to share their writing with each other and develop a cultural identity (as opposed to those contrived activities where students don't truly interact or share writing). In this classroom students are able to bring their out-of-school identities and writing practices into the classroom and use them as a basis as they learn to move flexibly through different discourses and writing styles. But how practical is this in today's classrooms?

I'm not a practicing teacher in the USA, but I hear often from teachers that they are constrained in a multitude of ways everyday by aspects of the school culture. For instance, they might be severely constrained on the time they have to teach writing to students, so with exam pressure they concentrate on how to get their students through the test rather than take up valuable time having students actually talk and interact with each other about their writing in order to develop an identity as a writer. The authors note, in fact, that studies show "students of color are disproportionately relegated to classrooms using drill exercises rather than interactive, meaningful approaches..." (p. 507). Research clearly shows this is ineffective teaching, but it still goes on - because of the culture of the school (?).

I know this blog post is one massive generalization (and I feel like I may have written a similar post in the past, but it's an issue I often ponder), but generally we've put a lot of time and money into teaching teachers. We prepare them as best we can before we send them out into schools, and generally, they are keen to put all the best practices they've learned into action. Don't most of them also have to undertake Master's degrees and/or take part in further training? Yet so many culturally diverse students are being left-behind because they're not being taught using the methods that research tells us works best, and that new teachers know about.

What happens to our new optimistic teachers - could it be the culture of the school that gets to them? Or is it simply too hard to put best practice into practice when faced with the testing culture of our educational system? As an aside I've started to plan my summer class teaching literacy and IT to adult students; my goal is to design a new literacies classroom to teach literacy, but with ALL of the standards I have to cover, I wonder how it will be possible in the time I have - the culture of the adult ed. field makes it extremely difficult for me to use what I consider to be the most effective teaching methods.

The authors explain that "every classroom has an identity of its own", which impacts how effectively a student's identity as a writer is developed, but it's more than that I think, it's the cultural identity of the school, the state, the assessments - how they're designed, who they're designed for, what they test....I could go on and on, but these are all elements that have an impact on whether students from all backgrounds get the opportunity to develop writing identities.

While we obviously need to keep educating teachers about how they can foster writing identity in all of their students, as well as educating them about teaching a variety of cultures and nationalities, will they be able to use any of it effectively until we begin to seriously explore, and hopefully change, the culture of the school and educational system in which students are being taught?