STANFORD UNIVERSITY-GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ... - NCTE

STANFORD UNIVERSITY-GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION Faculty Position in early literacy, with emphasis on elementary English language arts (Open Rank)

The Stanford Graduate School of Education is seeking nominations and applications for a faculty member specializing in early literacy. Successful candidates must demonstrate substantial evidence of a creative and productive program of research, impact on his or her field of study (or if junior, the potential for such impact), and a commitment to excellence in teaching and advising students at both graduate and undergraduate levels. The applicant should have prior experience teaching and/or working with teachers at the elementary level in classrooms with ethnically, linguistically, or socioeconomically diverse student populations. As a faculty member, responsibilities will include teaching graduate level and possibly undergraduate level courses for both prospective researchers and elementary teacher candidates. The faculty member will support doctoral students and doctoral research in related fields. Senior candidates should have an excellent record of research and teaching. Junior candidates should have completed a doctorate before the date of appointment and show evidence of excellent research and teaching potential. Applicants should provide a cover letter which describes research and teaching experience, a curriculum vitae, two examples of published, in press, or not yet published research, and a list of three references (complete with addresses and phone numbers). We will request letters of recommendation to be sent directly to Stanford for a small number of finalists. Applications will be reviewed beginning on September 15, 2015 and the position will remain open until it is filled. All application materials must be submitted online. Please submit your application on Academic Jobs Online: https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/5632 Questions pertaining to this position may be directed to Tanya Chamberlain, Faculty Affairs Officer, [email protected]. Stanford University is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty. It welcomes nominations of, and applications from, women, members of minority groups, protected veterans and individuals with disabilities, as well as others who would bring additional dimensions to the university’s research and teaching missions.

Journals from NCTE

Here’s what subscribers are saying about their NCTE journals . . . Without question, I would not be where I am professionally without NCTE journals. —Peter, Secondary member from Georgia

Practical ideas that are theoretically based—I use journal articles as the primary text in my English methods class for Secondary English Education students.

Language Arts presents solid theoretical perspectives that have helped me think deeply about current issues in the present political environment. Even though I am a secondary teacher educator, I find many of the articles a great asset for enriching companion pieces in English Journal and/or Voices from the Middle. —Roberta, member from California

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Responsibility, Creativity, and the Arts of Language

2015 NCTE Annual Convention November 19–22 Minneapolis, MN Workshops: November 19, 22–24

Teaching is an imperfectible art. I come to Convention to learn with others who have embraced this endlessly perplexing work. I leave—every time!—inspired. —Carol Jago, associate director, California Reading and Literature Project, UCLA, NCTE Past President

The influence of NCTE’s Annual Convention on my growth as a teacher is immeasurable. It is where I go to learn and to recharge. I wouldn’t think of missing it. —Kelly Gallagher, Anaheim Union High School District, California

I come to NCTE to connect with new ideas and people interested in the pedagogy and policies of literacy. That’s why I come, and I make those connections. However, when I leave, I often feel that I have also reconnected with myself. The Annual Convention is an opportunity for me to realign my goals and refocus on what matters in classrooms. MINNEAPOLIS, MN 2015

—Carol Revelle, University of North Texas

For more information, visit www.ncte.org/annual

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Macaluso, Juzwik, and Cushman

Editors’ Introduction

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Editors’ Introduction Storying Our Research

Kati Macaluso Mary Juzwik Ellen Cushman Michigan State University

We ended the previous volume year in deep contemplation about the final word of this journal’s title: English. We asked, Why English? Why English only? Why not Research in the Teaching of English(es)? We begin this new volume year—RTE’s 50th anniversary—thinking about the first word in the journal’s title: research. We come to this first word having thought a great deal over the past several months about story. Perhaps it has been on our minds as we have brainstormed ways of marking this 50th volume year—a year that in any person or institution’s life traditionally invites commemoration through stories. Story has crept into our conversations about manuscripts as we have pored over them, sometimes hearing the words of a former colleague, who—in his research methods courses—would often say of a research report: “I believe the author, but the story’s all wrong.” We know for certain that story became a centerpiece of the discussions that unfolded at our weekly editorial team meetings after we read the five papers that comprise this issue. Many of the authors in this issue push on or play at the edges of the conventional research article published in the social sciences, inviting a conceptual turn from research report to story. As editors, we feel this conceptual turn, and the articles and essays that inspire this turn, foreground a set of social and ethical responsibilities that researchers in the teaching of English(es) carry into their inquiry and writing. Todd DeStigter opens this issue with an argument about argument. Using ethnographic anecdotes drawn from his years of research in AP Composition courses in a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American neighborhood on Chicago’s southwest side, DeStigter surfaces and questions the assumptions undergirding argument’s esteemed status in the ELA curriculum. Like authors previously published in RTE (e.g., Newell, VanDerHeide, & Wynhoff Olsen, 2014), DeStigter takes up the epistemological underpinnings of argument, but rather than asking how students might be taught to write better argumentative essays, he explores why and how argumentative writing has assumed its place of privilege in U.S. curricula in the first place. In addition to questioning argumentation’s utility in fostering democracy and students’ socio-economic prospects, DeStigter makes visible a set of Cartesian and Kantian philosophies that pose questions not just for language and literacy educators, but also for researchers. To challenge argument’s position Research in the Teaching of English Volume 50, Number 1, August 2015

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Copyright © 2015 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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6 Research in the Teaching of English

Volume 50 August 2015

of privilege is, among other things, to call into question the Cartesian and Kantian claims to “an objective, extra-human reality made accessible through a combination of rigorous observation and abstract reasoning” (p. 17). After perusing DeStigter’s article, readers may wonder in relation to their own scholarly pursuits: What does it mean to know, and how varied or multiple might be our ways of knowing? Is there really such a thing as an “extra-human reality”? Might the “reality” we report in the written accounts of our research be constructed by a human narrator, who, in showing her humanity, makes her reliability—or unreliability, for that matter—more visible? As researchers, we might even walk away from DeStigter’s article asking ourselves whether knowing, convincing, and/or proving is, or ought to be, the function of research in the first place. Might research, like stories, serve to imagine, to evoke, to inspire? In the spirit of DeStigter’s quest to legitimize “other, nondominant modes of contemplation and expression” as well as “actions that grow from them” (p. 30), this question seems well worth our consideration as teachers, as researchers, as persons. Like DeStigter, Rebecca Woodard contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations about writing instruction, while also raising questions for the researcherwriters who comprise the readership of RTE. Her investigation into the links between two teachers’ writing instruction and their out-of-school writing practices honors the rich histories and experiences of teachers beyond the confines of the “professional.” By analyzing these writing teachers’ appropriations of talk and textual practices across contexts, Woodard challenges the notion of teachers as blank slates and teaching as a discrete skill set to be acquired and applied. Her research participants’ writing instruction, combined with their practices as creative and networked writers, evokes two key tenets shaping the spirit of the National Writing Project (of which Woodard herself was once a part): first is the assumption that “teachers are beings who live their identities and practices across times and spaces” (p. 37), and second is the understanding of “teaching as dialogic” (p. 37), by which we think she means that teaching, rather than a set of autonomous and observable practices, is an ongoing negotiation. Past experiences and present circumstances, conflicting and complementary ideologies, multiple actors and materials, etc. all coalesce in the act of teaching. Quoting Roozen’s (2007) claim that “we write who we are,” Woodard’s discussion suggests that teachers also “teach who [they] are” (p. 55). When considered in conversation with the articles and essays that comprise this issue, Woodard’s boundary-blurring research might also remind the readership of RTE that we research who we are. This notion of researching “who we are” seems most palpable in Denise Dávila’s article, where she writes her own spiritual history into her study of the 79 preservice teachers enrolled in her children’s literature course at a large public university. Dávila, who examines future teachers’ stances toward including religiously diverse books and addressing their religious content, comes to this investigation from the perspective of someone long misunderstood in the American public school system. Writing herself into the narrative of her research, Dávila remembers:


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Although my Salvadoran grandparents publically identified as Catholic, my family’s practice of Latin American espiritismo and my grandmother’s position as an espiritista influenced my worldview as a young person. Discussions of my family’s religious identity, however, were taboo outside of our home, especially in the secular space of my public school. (p. 61)

The tweet that colors the content of her second paragraph—“My spiritual ideas are not superstitious; they are part of my culture and identity. #WNDB1 to cultivate critical, pluralistic thinkers”—serves as a powerful example of a researcher owning her own story. Her autobiographical snapshots answer a question that all readers of RTE might strive to answer as they compose their next research article: Who am I to tell this story? Concluding that privileging nonreligious readings of children’s literature lends itself to a discourse of othering (Said, 1995) that denigrates nondominant cultures, including religious ones, Dávila underscores the dangers of authorizing inaccurate representations of people and cultures in the teaching of diverse books. In many ways, this article about the dangerous potential for teachers to de-authorize students’ religious identities, or to authorize an exotic, overgeneralized, or demeaning interpretation of a religious culture, carries implications for our own ethos-building endeavors and ethical responsibilities as researchers in the teaching of English(es). While calling upon teachers to question the soundness of their interpretations of religiously and culturally diverse literature, Dávila extends questions that also surfaced in the Editorial Introduction to our previous issue: Who has the right to tell whose story, and when? Under what conditions, and for whom? Though it’s tempting to offer an overly romanticized notion of story, stories can and have been used to marginalize, to do ill in the world, and to differentiate “us” from “them,” as can be seen very dramatically in the anti-Semitic propagandistic stories circulated throughout Nazi Germany. Asking ourselves, as researchers, what ends our stories are serving may help us to imagine the various possible ways we might tell our stories to serve those ends as ethically as possible. It is this last question that Amy Johnson Lachuk takes up so compellingly. The product of several years’ worth of life history interviews conducted with persons in an African American majority, rural community in the southeastern United States, Johnson Lachuk’s article is quite literally a collection of stories. Miss Sally Harris, an African American educator and community activist, emerges as the central character in these stories that speak to the “entanglement” (p. 89) of literacy, education, and sociohistorical context in this community. We hear Miss Sally’s voice—not through a conventional report of excerpted interview transcripts—but rather through a series of first-person data poems. Johnson Lachuk constructs these data poems in response to the ethical and social responsibilities that accompany her role as a listener of other people’s stories. She writes, “I realized that ‘poetic re-presentation’ (Ward, 2011, p. 357) could help address some of the ethical concerns related to life history research, such as balancing the representation of participants’ lived experiences with that of the authorial academic voice


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(Ward, 2011)” (p. 91). Johnson Lachuk’s poetic inquiry functions as yet another reminder of the importance of researchers owning their own stories, given the ways researchers’ own histories can dispose them to hear and interpret others’ stories differently. Her poems might serve as one example of what happens when the first voice we, as researchers, listen for is not our own (Royster, 1996), but they also serve as visible signs of the inevitable creativity—the literal poiesis—of research. The often-predictable organizational schemas of research articles published in the social sciences can obscure the creative construction that goes into research. Johnson Lachuk’s poetic inquiry reminds readers that the data do not in and of themselves tell the story. Authors construct the “story” of their inquiry—actually generating, not collecting—data, and then taking readers from data to analysis and interpretation. The framework for papers published in the social sciences functions as a centripetal force, but—like stories, which also abide by the centripetal force of narrative coherence—there are always loose ends, details not selected for inclusion, etc. Owning our stories as researchers, then, is not only to address the question, Who am I to tell this story? but also to make visible the inventiveness behind our research—to approach the manuscripts we’re writing not just as reports, but also as stories under construction. Of course, there may be reasons why authors elect not to adopt such an approach in their writing. Making this “made-ness” of research visible does, to be sure, make a researcher vulnerable—as can be seen in Dávila’s storying of her own religious ethos. Making such decisions to write dimensions of our multifaceted selves and lives into papers we write—perhaps especially for those who hail from historically marginalized groups—can be fraught with tension and sometimes even pain (Brandt et al., 2001). Aware of this vulnerability, we have to ask how much researcher storying is enough? At what point does it cease to be relevant and fall into the realm of too much information or excessive navel-gazing? It is worth considering, too, the ways that researcher self-storying can effectively permeate a manuscript, rather than being confined to a perfunctory sentence or an isolated paragraph about researcher positionality in a methods section. We think, for example, about choices of pronouns (I vs. the researcher; we vs. them, and so on), parenthetical asides or footnotes, surprising connections or synergies between research participants’ stories and one’s own life, words or turns of phrase that resonate with the social world under study. For example, one word reverberates throughout Ellen’s research and stems from her position as a Cherokee woman, researcher, teacher, and scholar. ᎦᏚᎩ /gadugi/ is a Cherokee term that connotes people working together toward a commonly shared goal. This tribal ethic of community effort toward a shared greater good has a long history in the Cherokee tribe. It describes work teams formed at Baptist churches to support widows and orphans, or to organize socials (Cushman, 2010). It also describes the ways Ellen has tried to contribute to the goals of the Cherokee Nation through her work with their communities. As she argues in a piece about Native American self-representation in rhetoric-composition studies, it is rarely satisfying for an author to merely self-identify as a particular kind of person in scholarship; instead, accountability to the communities researchers study occurs in myriad


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ways as a scholar enters into or participates in the life of a community and crafts an ethos as a credible, ethical researcher (Cushman, 2008). Storying our research, then, might help us to conceive of an RTE audience beyond the academy and to imagine our research being accessible to and inviting reciprocity with members of the communities we research. We conclude this issue with a Forum piece by historian of education and teacher-educator Jonna Perrillo, who suggests that “instead of upholding divisions between ‘creative writing’ and ‘evidence-based writing,’ we should be thinking about how the two can inform each other” (p. 117). Perrillo looks closely at a once-thriving movement of poetry instruction and appreciation spearheaded by Hughes Mearns, a teacher in the laboratory school at Teachers College, Columbia University, in the 1920s. Arguing that these interwar years in U.S. education mirror the current climate of standardization, Perrillo looks for hope in the successes of Mearns’s efforts to bring out a “higher grade of artistic achievement” (Mearns, 1926, p. 119) in teachers and students in spite of standardized school programs that “drummed such creative capacity out of them” (p. 113). We believe that Perrillo’s archival research into Hughes Mearns’s commitment to poetry speaks to teachers caught in an era of standardization and to researchers caught in the quagmires of APA formatting. As teachers, researchers, and writers, we hear in Perrillo’s Forum essay the wisdom of her Mearns-inspired words: that writing is “at once both methodical and deeply personal, even if unconsciously so” (p. 117). In many ways, Perrillo’s Forum piece does what we hope the notion of “storying research” does for the RTE readership: it positions the creative, the artistic, and the personal as important and meaningful, indeed as a social responsibility we take up when we listen to and craft stories, especially the stories of those whose work has so importantly shaped the field and this journal. Out of respect for the people whose work has advanced the field of research in the teaching of English(es), we also wish to correct two errors that appeared in the Editorial Introduction of our previous issue. First, on p.335, the reference to Smagorinsky (2014) noted that “changes in the school climate can contribute to the emotional well-being of neurotypical students.” This should have read “neuroatypical.” Second, on p.337, in a paragraph devoted to the topic of representing self and others, there is an omission of words that resulted in a misrepresentation of one of our authors, Maneka Deanna Brooks, who identifies as African American and Sri Lankan. The sentence that reads, “What do we [. . .] make of the reality that all these authors identify as White. . .?” should have read, “What do we [. . .] make of the reality that all but one of these authors identify as White. . .?” These changes have been made to the PDF files, and are now available online. This 50th year of RTE’s existence prompts us to reflect on the most impactful stories, people, and research that have shaped the conversations unfolding in this journal’s pages over the last half-century. To mark RTE’s 50th anniversary year, we have asked Peter Smagorinsky to lead a team of previous RTE journal editors to select and discuss what they believe to be some of the most impactful pieces this journal has published. Future issues in this volume year will include Forum essays from former RTE editors who will discuss the significance of these articles and


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scholars. As we look ahead to the next 50 years, we hope that the authors in this issue help readers and future authors find their way toward continuing these conversations through research that is not only sound and scholarly, but also “storied.” Eudora Welty (1984), American novelist and short story writer, once wrote, “Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them” (p. 16). So now, we leave you to listen not only to but for the stories that follow—our authors’ autobiographical tales, their research participants’ stories, the story implicitly constructed in their movement from problem to research question, to data, to analysis, and so on. We hope that such listening provokes generative questions of ethical and social responsibility for all of us as researchers. We hope the five pieces in this issue inspire all of us who read Research in the Teaching of English to listen for our own life stories shaping our scholarly interests and inquiry, the stories of the people and communities we research, and the story we will inevitably create as we write our way through our next manuscript. Note 1. #WeNeedDiverseBooks, a social-media campaign calling for children’s books that reflect a wider range of lives and experiences

References Brandt, D., Cushman, E., Gere, A. R., Herrington, A., Miller, R. E., Villanueva, V., & Kirsch, G. (2001). The politics of the personal: Storying our lives against the grain. Symposium collective. College English, 64, 41–62. Cushman, E. (2008). Toward a rhetoric of self-representation: Identity politics in Indian country and rhetoric and composition. College Composition and Communication, 60, 321–365. Cushman, E. (2010). ᎦᏚᎩ Gadugi: Where the fire burns. In S. Kahn (Ed.), Activism and rhetoric: Theories and contexts for political engagement (pp. 56–61). New York: Routledge.

teachers’ argumentative epistemologies for teaching writing. Research in the Teaching of English, 49(2), 95-119. Roozen, K. (2007). Math, the “poetry slam,” and mathemagicians: Tracing trajectories of practice and person. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 11(3). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric. net/11.3/topoi/prior-et-al/roozen/index.html Royster, J. (1996). When the first voice you hear is not your own. College Composition and Communication, 47, 29–40. Said, E. (1995). Orientalism: Western conceptions of the Orient (2nd ed.). London: Penguin.

Mearns, H. (1926). Creative youth: How a school environment can set free the creative spirit. New York: Doubleday.

Ward, A. (2011). “Bringing the message forward”: Using poetic re-presentation to solve research dilemmas. Qualitative Inquiry, 17, 355–363.

Newell, G. E., VanDerHeide, J., & Olsen, A. W. (2014). High school English language arts

Welty, E. (1984). One writer’s beginnings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


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