Abstract
This article explores how one urban high school under threat of state closure developed a multifaceted literacy program to transform the teaching and learning of literacy in a novel university/school partnership. Analyses of ethnographic and quantitative school data illustrate how the evolution of the literacy program could be understood as a consequence of generative frictions which produced changes in the program and some indication of changes in understanding of literacy and of students’ needs. We weave a story of multiple layers of changed curriculum, scheduling, assessments, and pedagogy to argue that we need to rethink the continuum of autonomous and ideological literacy to focus more on what the intersections of literacy ideologies generate.
Introduction
Meaningful literacy teaching and learning are messy, contingent, and recursive processes that run headlong into the simplicity of reductionist curriculum promoted by neoliberal school reformers popular in the United States under the Trump administration (Burnett & Merchant, 2016); we think of this as an autonomous wall. In urban schools under state review, the literacy curriculum is often task oriented and narrowly focused on basic skills, vocabulary, and mechanics as a strategy to meet accountability measures; this is how we define autonomous moving forward (Bartolomé, 1998; Tatum, 2006). This narrow focus can be partially explained by narratives of failure and underachievement based on deficit notions of urban students and their families that have a long history in education research (Francois, 2014; Nasir & Hand, 2006; Nieto, 2005). Moreover, current state violence against people who are protesting that same violence enacts these long-standing racist ideas. In Rochester, New York right now, we are seeing devastating attacks on peaceful protests in response to the murder of Daniel Prude by police (J. Brown, 2020). This can be - and is - demoralizing. However, there is a growing body of literacy research that operates from an asset perspective which views urban students as resource-rich (Francois, 2014; Love, 2019; Mirra et al., 2016; Morrell, 2008; Morrell & Rowsell, 2020). We use this anti-racist research to move past narrow conceptions of literacy learning as a “simple cognitive pathway between mind and text, accounts upheld through discourses of measurable outcomes and accountability structures” (Burnett & Merchant, 2016, p. 259). We define autonomous literacy as state communicated and “instrumental” (Johnson & Sullivan, 2020, p. 418), where correctness and conformity are valued. Ideological literacy is shaped by particular social, cultural, economic, and political contexts and humanizing pedagogies (Johnson & Sullivan, 2020). We argue that to address the wide range of literacies students bring to school, we need to rethink the continuum of autonomous and ideological literacy to focus more on what the intersections of literacy ideologies might generate.
This article brings together practitioners' and researchers' multiple epistemological and methodological perspectives explore how one urban high school developed a multifaceted literacy program to transform the teaching and learning of literacy in a novel university/school partnership. After grounding the research in literature and in theoretical and methodological contexts, we describe the research context in detail. Our findings will illustrate how the school put together a literacy program designed to meet academic and sociocultural needs that drew on Street’s (1995) concept of autonomous and ideological literacies. We close with some insights into research and practice.
Our Asset-Based Approach
Literacy research has focused on urban education for decades; however, we are still faced with a crisis of under-teaching and deficit perceptions of African American and Latinx youth (Baker-Bell, 2019; Delpit, 1988). One wonders whether the system is designed to under-teach urban youth, much the same way other systems imbued with systemic racism and White supremacy fail urban communities of color (Bartolomé, 1998; Kendi, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2012; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Love, 2019). While we will present our data more typically in the “Analysis” section of this article, a brief example from an interview will contextualize what under-teaching meant to staff: Cuz it’s like we come in thinking and assuming that the kids know stuff . . . Like, I assumed kids knew what characterization was. And then when I started talking about it—or conflict. Conflict [inaudible]. Do you know what the conflicts are: person versus person, person versus self? You know, and some of them did but a lot of them did not. (Interview, June 2016)
This excerpt from the end of Year 1 demonstrates that some students came to East Upper and Lower School in Rochester, NY the first year of the partnership not having learned what teachers expected. The impact of under-teaching became real for Larson while co-teaching in ninth-grade English Language Arts (ELA) as part of the ethnography. While introducing a lesson that required peer conferencing and revision, student reaction let her know that in their prior eight years of school, none of the 19 students had ever done either. In that moment, she faced the reality of youth who had been under taught, something she realized later the administration understood when they decided to purchase a pre-packaged literacy skills program that she had vehemently argued against. While she did not suddenly change her mind about standardized curriculum packages, she did think differently about what literacy practices were needed for her students. The program we discuss here represents how the literacy program attempted to address this under-teaching while also centering youth excellence.
Much of the early research on urban literacy operated from a deficit perspective, locating the problem in the student and their family (Whitehouse & Colvin, 2001). These studies viewed literacy as a cognitive skill and learning as the acquisition of that skill as measured in standardized tests. The assessments in pre-packaged reading interventions that are often used to “remediate” perceived gaps limit literacy learning opportunities to “basic” skills for the populations served in urban schools (Brooks & Rodela, 2018), what we refer to as under-teaching. Underlying reductionist curriculum that leads to under-teaching is a racist perception that African American and Latinx youth in urban schools cannot handle more complex literacies (Johnson & Sullivan, 2020). Delpit (2006) has articulated ways that teachers can shift their focus from seeing their students in deficit ways that lead to under-teaching to finding ways to teach equitably. Instead of teaching “down” to low expectations, teachers need to maintain high standards and expectations.
More recent research has moved beyond deficit ideologies to focus on the language and literacy assets of students and their families (Cammarota, 2011; Francois, 2014; Love, 2019; Mirra et al., 2016; Morrell & Rowsell, 2020). We now understand literacy to be a much more complex practice in which there is not one feature, but a complex set of both technical and cultural features (Gutiérrez, 2008; Love, 2014; Martinez, 2016, 2017) that affect literacy learning. Effective literacy teaching and learning support teacher agency in negotiating changes in instruction and school-wide practices (Francois, 2014). Moreover, research has shown that test-driven, formulaic literacy teaching does not automatically translate into enduring skills or practices that enable students to produce appropriately written texts or read across multiple genres (Araujo & Wickstrom, 2017; C. Brown et al., 2019). Often scaffolding for urban youth focuses on those with basic or intermediate skills and less on those with higher-order practices or disciplinary literacies (Delpit, 2006). Gauging the relative intensity of scaffolding needed and when to remove it is a complicated negotiation for literacy teachers who must plan for the transfer of the responsibility of knowledge production to students (Athanases & de Oliveira, 2014). Following Haddix and Sealey-Ruiz (2012), we see youth as producers of knowledge who can and do use a wide variety of literacy practices to do so. We present one urban school’s literacy program to illustrate what can be accomplished when researchers, teachers, administrators, and students collaborate for meaningful literacy learning.
Theoretical Framing
To both construct and understand the literacy program at East, we were faced with an epistemological dilemma—a dilemma between institution-centered autonomous literacy practices emphasized by the state and the salience of ideological literacy practices that center sociocultural learning, which literacy teachers were trying to implement. As a literacy researcher, Larson defined literacy as a social practice. This practice-oriented definition stems from sociocultural learning theory (Gee, 2004; Scribner & Cole, 1981; Street, 1995), which posits that human knowing is socially constructed (Berger & Luckman, 1966). Barton and Hamilton (1998) state this clearly: Literacy is primarily something people do; it is an activity, located in the space between thought and text. Literacy does not just reside in people’s heads as a set of skills to be learned, and it does not just reside on paper, captured as texts to be analyzed. Like all human activity, literacy is essentially social, and it is located in the interaction between people. (p. 3)
As such, literacy is not simply a discrete set of skills to be taught in similar ways across contexts but is rather situated within specific contexts and shaped by social interaction and power; this situates literacy as both autonomous and ideological perspective (Larson & Marsh, 2015).
Street (1995) deemed the narrow definition of literacy common in schools an autonomous model which he contrasts with what he calls an ideological model. In an ideological model, literacy is shaped by particular social, cultural, economic, and political contexts of use and is always ideological, that is, always carries particular meanings and is imbued with power (Street, 1995). This epistemological view is not new to most literacy researchers; however, it is this view that is the center of our dilemma. How does this definition of literacy help us with youth who came to high school not reading or writing conventional academic texts required by state testing? Given the state pressure, we were tasked with meeting autonomous measures while also building the trusting relationships needed for students to bring their literacy practices to school.
Given that literacies are always imbued with power, we needed a theory of power to understand how power worked in the reform. The university/school partnership itself was an act of power, as was the construction and implementation of the literacy program. The state’s surveillance was a persistent disciplinary power constantly at play. We used Foucault’s (1978/1990) concept of power as a complex set of force relations in which power produced actions to interpret changes we were seeing. Foucault (1977) argued that there are a plurality of resistances that exist in all power relations and that they are inevitable. We identified these resistances as generative frictions within which change was produced (Larson & Moses, 2018). Foucault’s (1978/1990) work on power helped us understand the micro-operations of power in everyday spaces between and among people. Understanding power at this micro level was important for us to build our interpretation of how the literacy program, as an initiative, was lived by staff at the school in their everyday work.
Using Foucault’s (1978/1990) analytics of power, we identified spaces of friction as power relations came into contact and found that these spaces were generative. The processes of working through and around these frictions produced the new and unexpected, which often led to meaningful change in the literacy program, pedagogical practices, and beliefs about literacy. Specifically, power produced generative frictions that animated changing understandings of the literacy program and conceptions of literacy as a social practice as these changes happened in the everyday work of the school. Certainly, all the points about social, cultural, economic, and political contexts imbued with power were at play for explaining why some of the youth at this school were in this situation. It was not about cognition or ability; we do not ascribe to deficit models of thinking around urban youth. We looked instead to theories that understand the ingenuity and creativity of African American and Latinx youth to understand how they navigated their world with literacy (Cammarota, 2011; Love, 2014; Martinez, 2016; Paris & Alim, 2014; Souto-Manning, 2013).
Research Context
To ground our explanation of research design and methodology, we need to describe the context of the research in general and the literacy context with which we began in particular. As is common in urban schools under state review, the seriousness of the “problem” of literacy in this school cannot be understated. We point to national statistics as a context for understanding the issues of re-mediation (Gutiérrez et at., 2009) with which we were faced. It may seem like a contradiction to focus on test scores as part of our argument; in many ways it is. Yet, no matter how we defined literacy or valued students’ practices, we were forced to provide statistical data (based on test scores) that demonstrated rising scores to the state to keep the school open. National statistics (National Assessment of Educational Progress, n.d.) show that 27% of eighth-grade students in large city public schools scored at or above proficiency in reading in 2017. When we examined the percentage of students entering East 1 in 2015 who were at or above proficiency on state ELA exams, the problem moved to crisis level. By comparison with the national averages, prior to the partnership (2014–2015 school year), 87% of seventh- and eighth-grade students enrolled at East scored a 1 on the state’s ELA exam; this means only 13% scored at or above proficiency—far below national averages for urban schools with similar demographics. Writing instruction was rudimentary and disjointed, focusing narrowly on the writing of short answers to text-based questions and formulaic essay construction for the primary purpose of passing state assessments.
In 2014, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) designated East in Rochester as a “persistently failing” school, citing the literacy scores mentioned above along with other markers such as graduation and suspension rates. NYSED offered the school five options: close, phase out, convert to charter, be subsumed by the state university system, or establish an Educational Partnership Organization (EPO) under special legislation (“Education Law 211-E,” 2016) that would make the school its own district, with unprecedented control of all aspects of running the school. The University of Rochester and the school board came to an agreement about the EPO.
University-school partnerships offer promising research-practice contexts to bring about the kind of fundamental changes needed, particularly in urban communities (Quartz et al., 2017). Recent work in university–school partnerships focuses on the complexity of problems schools encounter, such as the management of state standards and mandates with in-school culture(s), and argues that partnerships need to embrace that complexity (Noguera & Wells, 2011). Valli et al. (2016) developed a typology of reforms that attempt to meet the complexity of issues that is helpful when thinking about the work we are doing. The category of Full Service Community School (FSCS) mostly relates to the partnership we are building. By centering student, family, and community involvement in decision making, an FSCS emphasizes deep change in what is considered normative in culture in addition to changes in structure, curriculum and pedagogy, and outcomes.
The potential of becoming an EPO initiated a labor-intensive collaborative process between the University of Rochester, the Rochester City School Board, the East community, collective bargaining units, and NYSED. We engaged in conversations with the school board, the university’s school of education dean, faculty with expertise in running K-12 public schools, and with the university president that resulted in the university submitting a letter of intent to the state to serve as an EPO with East High School. While led by the graduate school of education, it is important to note that the partnership is with the university as a whole, with all the departments and resources that entail. We organized a leadership team of individuals who each headed committees - district, building leadership, curriculum and teaching, social and emotional support, family and community partnerships, and student life - that would gather the information needed to write the proposal. This leadership team of university faculty and school administrators met with community agencies, Rochester’s mayor, parents, community members, teachers, administrators, and students. More than 2,000 stakeholders over the course of 6 months provided extensive input, including from approximately 1,200 students across Grades 7 through 12 at the school in September 2014. We documented answers to questions about what students would like to see at East, what they thought needed changing, what classes they would like to take, and how we can better involve their families.
After collaboratively analyzing data gathered from meetings, interviews, and focus groups, we developed a full proposal that was submitted to NYSED in December 2014. The university was approved to serve as the EPO beginning July 1, 2015. We opened the doors to approximately 1,400 students in Grades 6 through 12 on September 8, 2015. In becoming an EPO, the goal was to transform the educational infrastructure and culture of underachievement of this school with an explicit focus on equity. To this end, we changed everything—curriculum, instruction, assessment, discipline, and school day, to name but a few main aspects. Given we had a five-year window in which to work, this initiative promised to offer new ideas about the time and effort it takes to implement radical school reform by highlighting one of the many comprehensive reforms we instituted—a multifaceted literacy program.
The EPO finished its fifth year amid the COVID-19 pandemic and has been approved by the NYSED for another three years. At the end of Year 4, there were approximately 1,250 students in Grades 6 through 12, and 190 teachers and administrators. Student demographics showed that 55% of students identified as African American, 32% as Latinx, 9% as White, 3% as Asian, and 1% as "Other" (distributed among American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander, or two or more categories); Fifteen percent of the student population were categorized English as a New Language (ENL) learners, and 14% were students with disabilities. Further, 46% identified as female and 54% as male. All of the students - 100% - received free lunch (a proxy for poverty). The 2019 demographics for teachers and administrators indicated that 76% identified as White, 10% as African American, 11% as Latinx, Asian American and Native American/Alaska Native each accounted for 1%, and 2% did not specify racial identification. In addition, 65% identified as female and 35% as male. When considering the intersection of race and gender, we note that 50% identified as White females and 26% as White males, 2% as African American females and 6% as African American males, and 8% as Latina and 1% as Latino. Gender identification among Asian Americans and Native American/Alaska Natives was evenly distributed.
Research shows that even the threat of school closure has a profound impact on urban schools (McWilliams, 2019), producing a constant tension between compliance and authenticity. Students, teachers, and administrators at the school experienced this tension as we experienced growth and simultaneously experienced the precarity of not meeting state requirements—our autonomous wall. One participant explained, We’re missing the forest for the trees. Everyone’s focused on these demonstrable indicators because we have to be. By just focusing on those, we’re missing out on opportunities for enrichment. We’re missing out on ways that we can teach above and beyond, or ways that we can inspire children to meet the indicators themselves. If you’re telling us, “We just need five of these students with disabilities to pass their Regents.” If we get our five, that’s enough right? No. It shouldn’t be. It’s got to be everyone. (Interview, May 2018)
We lived in a liminal space where ignoring state mandates would result in the school closing and where teachers and students were laboring to negotiate meaningful, robust, and life affirming literacy practices—the liminality found in an autonomous versus ideological perspective. This article presents where we are in this negotiation as of this writing. We have developed, and are continuing to refine, a comprehensive literacy program to address gaps while constructing authentic and meaningful literacy experiences for all students (see Table 2). This article asks the following question: What sort of approach to literacy is needed to support the full range of literacy needs in a grades 6 through 12 urban high school in a community with the highest poverty rate in the United States for similar sized cities?
Method: Participatory Ethnography
Building on participatory designs in qualitative research, we adapted participatory ethnography as a methodology that has been shown to be particularly well suited for complex organizations (Darrouzet et al., 2009). Participatory ethnography seeks to decolonize research, understanding that it has traditionally been a ground for the colonization of discourse and culture (Harrison, 1991; Hemment, 2007; Paris & Winn, 2013; Reyes Cruz & Sonn, 2011).
We regularly wrote curriculum that attempted to include traditional academic literacy and more authentic and relevant literacies, implemented that curriculum, gathered and interpreted data from instruction and student-based experiences, and then revised curriculum and pedagogy with the ideological perspectives as a guide. Analyses of both quantitative and qualitative data provided the opportunity to examine how the evolution of the literacy program could be understood as generative frictions that produced changes in the program and some indication of changes in the understandings of literacy and of students’ needs. Participatory ethnography focuses on building understanding within the system, alongside the participants, and positions all parties as knowledge builders and actors of change within the system—we are all researchers/researched. We weave a story of multiple layers of changed curriculum, scheduling, assessments, and pedagogy, including mention of challenges encountered along the way. What happens in that relationship is where knowledge production happened.
Furthermore, the critical participatory stance we adapted to this methodology explicitly positions the research as emancipatory and the researcher as a full participant in that emancipatory work. Following research methodologies of participatory action research (Irizarry & Brown, 2014) and community-engaged scholarship (Holland et al., 2010), we sought to bring together the differing positionalities of university researchers and practitioners and a critical view of culture and power (Eisenhart, 2018) to work toward equity and excellence in urban education. The co-researcher stance was an important position to take given the collaborative nature of the partnership and the desire to authentically learn from each other. Larson was a professor at the University of Rochester and one of the leaders of the partnership. She consulted on the workshop model for the program and co-taught two classes at the school throughout the partnership: a ninth-grade ELA critical literacy unit and a yearlong credit-bearing elective on Hip-Hop. With a full year sabbatical in Year 1 of the partnership, she began the ethnography full-time. In subsequent years, she spent 60% of her time at the school in research, co-teaching, and leadership capacities. Duret was a doctoral student research assistant working at the school on both this study and dissertation work. Rees was the assistant principal for data and accountability at the school and was also the administrator responsible for the literacy program. Anderson was the literacy coach and teacher leader; she conducted regular coaching cycles, and led daily collaborative planning times (CPTs) and summer professional development.
Data Corpus
Quantitative school data were regularly accessed from a variety of digital data systems including the school’s student information system (PowerSchool), the main school district’s data warehouse, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) systems such as the Achievement Manager and Teacher and Leader Central data dashboards. Data from multiple systems were compiled and organized by Rees. In addition, HMH provided a mid- and end-of-year gains analysis relative to the subset of students involved in the System 44 and Read 180 interventions. Rees regularly gathered and analyzed these data from these systems throughout and between school years to inform adjustments and responsiveness to student needs and state accountability requirements for the whole school and for the literacy program in particular.
In addition to the traditional quantitative school data collected as part of everyday practice, we used ethnographic data collected through Larson’s long-term participatory ethnography of the partnership. Larson observed nine teachers’ classrooms weekly during Year 1, taking field notes and gathering documents. She interviewed each teacher at the beginning and end of Year 1 and annually at the end of each year thereafter, while continuing to observe throughout the school. Informal interviews occurred on a daily basis. Unit and lesson plans were collected for observed teachers and from the two classes she co-taught. Administrators (n = 8) were observed in various aspects of their workday and interviewed following the same pattern as teachers. Participants were shadowed for a full day at least once. The rich diversity of data sources provided triangulation of findings and includes 5 years of data as follows: field notes of participant observation in classrooms, leadership and staff meetings, hallways, cafeterias, auditoriums, and full-day shadowing of key participants; formal and informal interviews; focus groups; documents, including unit and lesson plans, emails, news articles, and meeting minutes; research and teaching memos; photographs; and annual climate surveys of teachers, staff, students, and families. This array of data informs our ethnographic approach to see what happens when a university partners with an urban high school slated for state closure and what role literacy plays in this reform partnership?
Analysis
Data interpretation was done in iterative cycles, a process based on what Freire (1972) called praxis, or the work of human activity that “consists of action and reflection: it is praxis; it is transformation of the world. And as praxis it requires theory to illuminate it” (p. 96). We used constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014) analyses to develop themes across the data and held focus groups to check their credibility. The specific focus on the approach to literacy emerged over the course of this analysis. A constant comparative process was used to develop the claims presented in this article. Once initial themes were identified, focus groups with participants provided confirmation of developing claims. Drafts of this article were shared with the literacy team (including the workshop and Read 180 teachers, Anderson, and Rees) and their insights were included. Following this iterative process, we aligned analyses with the four trustworthiness criteria for high-quality qualitative research: dependability, transferability, confirmability, and credibility (Guba & Lincoln, 2000; Marshall & Rossman, 2016). Prolonged engagement, persistent observation with thick description, peer debriefing, researcher reflexivity, triangulation, and constant comparative analyses established trustworthiness of findings.
Findings: Generative Frictions Animated Change
As the approach to literacy evolved over 5 years, various generative frictions produced changes to the literacy program itself (see Table 1). Following Foucault, we did not assign “good” or “bad” categories to these frictions, instead we interpreted the changes as productive in that the emphasis was on what will work most authentically for student learning. Three main themes emerged in our analysis: various definitions of literacy, realities of student needs, and scheduling. For this article, we will focus on the various definitions of literacy that ran across the autonomous and ideological continuum. Some threads from the other themes are seen in our discussion given how interconnected data were.
Generative Frictions.
Autonomous Versus Ideological Literacies
When writing the EPO plan, university faculty joined groups of teachers and administrators to research and recommend literacy curricula. We knew that the plan already included double blocks of literacy (ELA and literacy). The ELA committee recommended adaptations of the Common Core for ELA and Atwell’s (2014) readers’ and writers’ workshop for the literacy block. However, the newly hired EPO Superintendent added Read 180 and System 44 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, n.d.), commercial reading intervention programs, to more directly address the needs of significantly struggling readers. This decision became part of the first generative friction we identified.
The Superintendent cited the remarkably low scores on ELA assessments for students entering the school and the state’s demand to increase those scores. We shared an understanding that these youth had been under taught prior to coming to East. The question was what to do about it. We found that only 2% of students in Grades 7 and 8 were demonstrating proficiency on the New York State’s ELA assessment and more than 80% of students were consistently scoring in the lowest proficiency band. At the high school level, only 30.9% of students in the 11th grade had passed the English Regents Exam, one of five high-stakes exams required for graduation, and the graduation rate suffered accordingly (it was publicly stated as 30%).
Differences in definitions of literacy resulted in tensions around curriculum decisions and workshop implementation between Larson and the school’s nascent literacy team at the beginning of the partnership. She objected strongly to purchasing a skills-based scripted curriculum (e.g., Read 180), citing research on the effects of such packages on authentic literacy learning, especially when disproportionately targeted at African American and Latinx youth in urban schools. Typically, students in these schools only receive skills-level instruction, which does not support authentic literacies that, in turn, perpetuates their underperformance on required tests (Bartolomé, 1998; Delpit, 1988; Shannon, 2013). She argued that this is how the school got here in the first place. The school purchased the programs anyway and contracted for professional development with the publishing company.
Alongside the use of a pre-packaged curriculum, teachers began to notice a shift in how they understood literacy and how that change connected to their practice.
I feel like this—this year has been characterized by really cool literacy opportunities with something to be desired insofar as the literacy growth that happened. So, and that’s what I told [inaudible]. A lot what I do is developing their identity as literate consumers and producers. And if that’s what I did this year, then that’s cool. I think that that’s more than, you know, they can get in a typical classroom. (Interview, June 2016)
One key change that emerged for Larson was a rethinking of Street’s (1995) concept of the continuum of autonomous and ideological literacies, specifically that he proposes a continuum, not a dichotomy. It has become common in academic circles, including for Larson, to position the ideological end of Street’s definition as the “best” or “good” end. This stance ignores Street’s argument that the continuum exists and that there may be contexts in which all points on the curriculum are needed. Street’s (1995) definition of literacy includes understanding how literacies are imbued in relations of power. Foucault’s (1978/1990) work on micro-operations of power in everyday spaces helped us understand the ways in which power produced the context in which African American and Latinx students at the school were under-taught. We were challenged to re-mediate (Gutiérrez et al., 2009) under-teaching using intersections of autonomous and ideological literacies in ways that met our goal of liberation, not just meeting state scoring minimums. Teachers remained focused on their students and what they needed to grow as literacy users and producers. This laser focus on students’ needs led us to see autonomous/ideological as a relationship instead of a versus.
At the end of Year 1, one participant discussed how the dialogical theoretical perspective brought by researchers encouraged them to make change, but was also confusing. Given that we changed everything at once, learning to bring things together meaningfully was taking time; it was not simply a matter of straightforward implementation.
So, but that again comes into the whole me trying too hard to integrate everything that I learned at once. And so like the workshop model in my mind is so freeform. I tried to figure out how to deliver that while still encouraging my students to give me actual products that were not inauthentic and trying to put standards-based grading in there too when I didn’t fully understand standards-based grading, but I wanted to take this year in workshop to figure it out and for my kids to start getting used to it. And the whole learning targets and the universal backwards design piece I tried to make happen, but that didn’t really work because, you know, I didn’t have tangible units of study. I—I had more like ideas that I wanted to impart to the kids, but they didn’t really have a way to show me. (Interview, June 2016)
This excerpt illustrates the complexity of navigating new curriculum writing practices, different understandings of literacy, and the dynamics of student needs and interests with which teachers were coping. We can see the struggle to make connections between the ideological/autonomous dialectic, curriculum models, student interests, and state mandates. The following section will show how we constructed space for teachers and administrators to safely navigate this complexity.
Negotiating Ideological and Autonomous Literacy Practices
Generative frictions encountered as the initial design of the literacy program struggled to meet the needs of students produced significant revisions in the program (see Table 2). In addition to the more targeted interventions associated with the curriculum package, a rethinking of the readers’ and writers’ workshop model was crucial. The literacy team produced adapted curriculum from Read 180 and original curriculum for the readers’ and writers’ model that included more socially and culturally sustaining materials and practices, more authentic assessments, and more engaging activities.
Changes in Literacy Programs.
Note. UbD = Understanding by Design; PTs = performance tasks; CEPTs = Curriculum Embedded Performance Tasks.
The labor required in this curriculum writing cannot be underestimated. Teachers and Anderson worked every summer writing and rewriting four curriculum units per grade level for Read 180, System 44, and workshop following the Understanding by Design (UbD; Wiggans & McTighe, 1998) format required by the EPO. A daily collaborative planning time led by Anderson was also used to develop and revise curriculum during the school year. Table 2 illustrates the difference between Year 1 and Year 5. This demonstrates the intersections of our changing understanding of literacy worked within each curricular initiative in ways that centered students’ learning needs and their interests.
Toward autonomous ends
Analyses of June 2019 Read 180 data indicated promising improvements in the scores needed to avoid state closure. These scores were one of what the state called Demonstrable Indicators (DIs). We were required to meet annual DI targets to remain open. Of the 43 students in the 2018 cohort who were enrolled with us in Grade 6 (September 2015) through this year in Grade 9 (June 2019) for 4 years of the partnership and our literacy program, we have reduced the percentage of students in this group reading far below grade level from 83.7% to 18.6% (–65.1%). Of the eight students still reading far below grade level, most began with us testing as “beginning readers,” and as a group, they still grew an average of 507 Lexile points, which exceeded average growth rates. We have increased the percentage of students in this group reading at or above grade level from 7.0% to 58.1% (+51.1%).
The impact on state exams in both lower and upper school on students who participated since the beginning of the partnership has also been promising. In the lower school (Grades 6–8), the percentage of students meeting and exceeding standards on the middle school ELA assessments (see Table 3) showed an increase from 2% to 11% of students in this range within the first three years, as well as a significant decrease in the percentage of students scoring the lowest proficiency band, from 87% in 2014–2015 to 59% in 2017–2018.
NYS 6–8 ELA Assessment Results.
NYS = New York State; ELA = English Language Arts.
It is important to note that literacy teachers assigned to Read 180 worked at the intersection of autonomous and ideological literacies and did not simply implement the program as is. In addition to rewriting the curriculum using the school’s UbD guidelines, some teachers “workshopped” Read 180. By this, we mean they added more authentic writing opportunities that included revisions. In addition to the large Read 180 library, students had access to the newly developed and expanding library available to students in the literacy classes.
Toward the ideological
The EPO established Atwell’s readers’ and writers’ workshop model to frame literacy classes for students who read on grade level. The literacy team realized early that a pre-established model was not the form of curriculum that would best meet the needs and literacy practices of the students at East, especially given what we know about the role labeling plays in supporting literacy learning (Learned et al., 2019). Students were unaccustomed to having two literacy classes, an ELA class and a “literacy” class, and were honest about their discomfort when asked to engage in a restorative justice peace circle specifically about and with their literacy class. One teacher had struggled with student engagement during the first year of offering this class. Students would linger in the hallway and come in late, talk during mini-lessons, and resist completing activities. The teacher asked a social worker to facilitate a peace circle. One of the many changes we made was to use restorative justice practices to replace the prior punitive approach (Marsh, 2017). During Round 1 of the circle, students shared their responses to the first questions: “(1) how do you feel in this class and (2) what have you gotten out of this class?” • Honestly I don’t like this class; it’s boring; we just sit reading and writing; we don’t go nowhere; feels like this class is not needed • I guess this class is okay • I like it but it’s boring; when we do activities it’s fun but when we just read and write it’s boring • Not my favorite class; don’t get much out of it • Get to publish, but I feel like this is unnecessary • We do the same thing every time; too much overlap with English, but I like publishing • Frustrated, could get a lot out of this class but don’t • I don’t like this class, nobody does; It’s not cool to like this class; what I get out of it, some sleep. (Field notes, February 2016)
In Round 2, the teacher asked students to describe how the situation could become a “win-win,” referring to another initiative, “Leader in Me” (Covey, 2008). Students shared that they would like “more hands on” activities and “more fun stuff.” A number of students said they did not like publishing and suggested it could be extra credit or something that happened in an after-school program. One student seemed to get to the heart of the matter: Most of us don’t want to be here that’s why we come in the way we do; no class is going to be quiet for 72 minutes; we already know what we are going to do in here that’s why we stay in the hallway.
This student feedback produced generative frictions around how to shape the literacy class so that students saw it as worthwhile and meaningful. Teachers needed to consider that this was not another ELA class as they worked on rewriting the curriculum. One participant expressed worry about a key goal of the literacy class that remained a concern 2 years after that peace circle:
It’s so hard though, because literacy is everything.
It is.
How do I teach kids everything?
I know.
I can’t. That’s why you’ve got to just foster a love of literacy so that they can then just move forward and teach themselves. (Interview, May 2018)
With honest student perspectives in mind and the EPO goal to develop a love of literacy, we understood that ongoing changes to the workshop curriculum were needed to not only meet state literacy standards but to also integrate and honor student literacy practices and interests. Students’ perception that reading and writing were boring led the team to look more closely at what was available for students to read. After conducting a review of texts available to students for self-selected, independent reading, they discovered a lack of diversity relative to the wide range of interests, ages, cultures, and identities of the student population. To change this, students developed wish lists and the team leveraged funds to curate a larger, more relevant, and robust collection.
Chief among these changes was writing original curriculum from the workshop model that addressed the school’s mission, the UbD unit and lesson writing requirements, and students’ interests and needs. Working toward more authentic assessments was one way the literacy team addressed students’ concerns about the purpose of the workshop classes. The team worked to design horizontal and vertical alignment in the curriculum across Grades 6 to 9 that balanced the reading and writing components of the workshop model, and using careful analyses of common formative assessment (CFA) data on student writing to inform practice. Given the commitment to move students from Read 180 to workshop (related to the scheduling generative friction), they developed scaffolding strategies to integrate these students smoothly whenever they were ready to move and worked diligently with counselors to make sure students were moved when needed.
The flexibility of the workshop model afforded the literacy team the freedom and creativity to design curriculum and Curriculum Embedded Performance Tasks (CEPTs) that were relevant and engaging for students, which improved student buy-in to the second literacy course. Teachers developed CEPTs that included external audiences. For example, in sixth grade, students performed their spoken-word poems at a local coffee shop. In ninth grade, workshop students published annual anthologies of their writing that were available to families and the community. The lower school now holds annual book fairs. As part of the changes in the culture of literacy at the school, teachers took students to the library regularly and on field trips to bookstores. School-wide reads and book clubs now happen regularly for students, teachers, and families.
At the beginning of Year 5, we hosted a symposium for the community with HMH, the company that produces Read 180 and System 44. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was impressed with the increase in our scores and wanted to recognize the work the teachers and students had done. The most important part of the day came at the end when two students shared their stories. One student, a young man who identified as an English language learner, described how he came to the school not reading and with a Reading Inventory score below 300. With the teacher’s support, he improved to the point of moving out of Read 180 to workshop in ninth grade. He said, “Before I didn’t see myself as a reader, but now I see myself as a published author” (Field notes, September 2019). This young man was also a student in Larson’s ninth-grade ELA class in spring 2019 and was one of the group’s best writers. To us, this young man’s story is why rethinking what counts as quality literacy instruction in ways that support all youth, by whatever means necessary, to see themselves as literate is the point of it all.
Conclusion
We began by positioning our work within the context of neoliberal accountability that threatens school closure if autonomous measures are not met. We described our effort to develop a robust literacy program that met these external measures but that also offered youth meaningful, culturally sustaining literacy curricula. Our analyses demonstrated that we needed to move past thinking of literacy as either autonomous or ideological or even autonomous and ideological. Rather, as Street (1995) argued, all literacies are ideological. What we found was that the intersection between autonomous/ideological models of literacy is where we needed to work to generate authentic literacy teaching and learning across the literacy program. Given the role of the under-teaching of African American and Latinx youth in urban schools which we saw as related to larger systemic inequities rooted in White supremacy, we needed to redress these inequities by whatever means necessary.
Challenging dichotomies occurred within the researcher/practitioner binary as well. With Larson’s long-term participatory ethnography wherein she was able to work alongside teachers and administrators, we were able to see that what each of us knew is necessary and valid—no one knew a “one right way.” From this perspective, we worked against the epistemological injustice that is common in academic research when practitioners are seen as not knowing. The generative frictions that occurred produced changes that improved not only the literacy program but also improved the university-school partnership. Building on the shift to collaborative, community-engaged scholarship in the academic research community is critical if we (researchers) take seriously the work needed to move beyond simply managing inequity (Love et al., 2020) toward liberatory education.
In addition to the implications for researchers, we found implications for practice that may be useful. Teachers and administrators can work to construct an environment where all involved understand the development of a literacy program to exist on a spectrum; neither end can be deemed good nor bad but rather the intersections of autonomous and ideological literacy practices generate a literacy program that works for the settings, teachers, and students involved. Given that we needed to write original curriculum from the workshop model that addressed the school’s mission, the UbD unit and lesson writing requirements, and students’ interests and needs while also meeting external state mandates, other schools could consider autonomous state mandated/suggested curriculum as a guide or template for then developing original curriculum which matches the literacies that already exist for students and staff within the school site. From the ideological end of the continuum, it is important to take advantage of the generative frictions produced through student feedback and participation in the development of literacy curriculum to build a literacy curriculum which students see as worthwhile.
There is no magic bullet to “fix” literacy in urban education. There is no magic fix that will make up for 400 years of systematic marginalization and oppression of the populations served in schools in communities working against poverty. We have to face the realities of institutionally racist structures and policies that have left urban children and youth under taught and that ignore the richness of the knowledge and practices they bring to school (Martinez, 2017). Furthermore, there is no one “right” theory to interpret literacies. We suggest considering the intersectionality of epistemologies and practices that work dialogically to produce meaning, an autonomous/ideological definition of literacy. We discussed how one urban school developed and implemented a comprehensive, asset-based, multifaceted approach to literacy that showed promise in terms of improving the teaching and learning of literacy, all while facing the autonomous wall of state accountability. Many schools in urban geographies are facing similar issues. Collaborative university–school partnerships, authentic community engagement, and student participation in what they learn which we have seen hold promise for other schools. This is a difficult, everyday work: You cannot leave when it gets hard. As Ladson-Billings (2013) stated, the “stakes is high.”
Supplemental Material
sj-zip-1-jlr-10.1177_1086296X211009279 – Supplemental material for Challenging the Autonomous Wall: Literacy Work in an Urban High School
Supplemental material, sj-zip-1-jlr-10.1177_1086296X211009279 for Challenging the Autonomous Wall: Literacy Work in an Urban High School by Joanne Larson, Eleni Duret, Jennifer Rees and Jessica Anderson in Journal of Literacy Research
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research reported here was partially funded by the Spencer Foundation (#201600080).
Notes
References
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