Understanding resistance: Preservice teachers’ discourse models of struggling readers and school literacy tasks

Lesley, Mellinee. (2011). Understanding resistance: Preservice teachers’ discourse models of struggling readers and school literacy tasks. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 55(1), 25-34.

Getting preservice secondary content area teachers to accept that they are teachers of literacy and not just of their chosen content areas is a perennial challenge for literacy teacher educators. Lesley, the teacher of a preservice content area literacy course, launched the research reported here as a result of disturbing comments in her students’ assignments and in course evaluations, comments that revealed certain kinds of attitudes and beliefs toward reading and writing and toward students who struggle with reading and writing. Lesley’s experiences echoed my own experiences teaching content area literacy. I particularly remember one spring day, on the last day of class, when my students and I were reflecting and “wrapping up” the semester. The whole theme of the semester had been “every teacher a teacher of reading and writing,” and I had stressed what then was commonly called “literacy across the curriculum.” One of my students, a nontraditional-age male math major, raised his hand near the end of the class and said, dismissively, “All of this stuff really is just for the English teachers, though, isn’t it?” When recounting this incident, which took place in a classroom on the top level of a Gothic-looking sandstone building with pointed towers that is iconic on our campus, I have joked to my colleagues that at that moment I thought of ending it all and leaping from one of those towers. All jokes aside, though, it was a depressing realization that my course had made no impact upon that soon-to-be high school math teacher. Lesley’s concern about resistance among her own preservice students therefore resonated with me.

Lesley gathered data on her students’ attitudes toward reading, the teaching of reading, and struggling readers by having her students each write a “literacy autobiography.” In this paper, they discussed how they remembered learning to read and write, as well as their experiences with literacy since then and their feelings about themselves as readers and writers. Lesley identified five discourse themes in the data which she calls “Master Models”. These Master Models are: 1) School Experiences Have Greater Impact Than Home Experiences, 2) Literacy Ability Does Not Change From Elementary School, 3) School Expectations Are Based on Narrow Definitions and Evaluations of Literacy Performance, 4) Reading is a Forced and Inevitably Boring Task in School, 5) School Writing Is Rarely a Tool for Exploration, Creativity, or Thinking. If these are the mental models of literacy our secondary preservice teachers hold generally, then the picture for literacy instruction, and for students who struggle with literacy at the secondary level, is bleak.

I used to require a literacy autobiography just like this in literacy methods courses I teach. I abandoned the assignment a few years ago for several reasons, one of which was that the papers were self-absorbed, negative, and just served to assist my students in confirming and reinforcing conceptions of reading and writing that they already had, notions that I wanted to somehow counteract, but I wasn’t sure how (and I’m not totally sure yet). One thing I noticed from these literacy autobiographies was that the preservice teachers at my university tended to fall into two categories. They either wrote gushingly about loving to read (though not all of these also loved to write), or they wrote about hating reading and writing as a child, and continuing to hate reading and writing as adults (with strong hints that I required too much reading and writing of them in the literacy methods course). Those who loved reading tended to have idealistic ideas that they were going to “save” children from homes which they saw as literacy-impoverished, and endow their students with the suburban literacy values they felt privileged to have been given as children. No matter that sometimes literacy instruction had been boring in some classrooms; in THEIR classrooms they would MAKE children love reading and books. Those who hated reading, ironically, seemed bent on replicating the classrooms they had experienced as children and been turned off by. These were the preservice teachers who proposed the most traditional kinds of assessments, the lowest level learning outcomes, the most unimaginative, underdeveloped lesson plans, often full of worksheet-type ready-made activities. They were the ones who saw literacy as a chore, and intended to teach their students literacy as a chore. They bemoaned this type of literacy teaching in retrospect, but moved toward perpetuating it. I’ve tried to understand why, but I have no answers. When I’ve been feeling cynical about this, I’ve concluded that these students of mine have realized that designing more motivating literacy instruction would require more reading and writing and thinking on their part than they are willing to do, so they would rather go with the old “lazy” way of teaching they are familiar with, even if it is the way that turned them off to literacy. That’s probably a simplistic explanation, though, born of my own frustration. Probably it’s just that we go with conceptions we know, in the absence of anything else to cling to. That is just as much true of my students who “loved” reading and sought to “save” their students with suburban values.

The important thing is, how do we open up preservice teachers’ minds to get beyond some of the life experiences that have made such an indelible stamp upon the ways they view literacy? The first step is to confront and examine our conceptions of literacy, and the literacy autobiography could be one way of doing that. Perhaps I need to think about bringing the assignment back, but somehow helping my students engage in a more productive kind of reflection—a kind of reflection that nudges them to interrogate their own beliefs and feelings, to see their sources and the purposes they serve, and to consider interrupting the transmission cycle so they don’t create another generation with the same mindset toward literacy. Conceptual change can be very tough to accomplish, but we still have to try.