Introduction to “Emerging From Standardization: Learning to Teach for Cultural, Cognitive, and Community Relevance”

During the early 1970s, I inaugurated what became my teaching career by asking the inner city students in the 10th grade World History class where I was student teaching what they wanted to learn. I did this after the students demonstrated an utter lack of interest in the lesson I had prepared on feudalism in Europe, which followed my observation of their general boredom with the textbook. While posing such a question was not something teachers normally did, my cooperating teacher allowed me to spend a week pursuing a unit I co-constructed with the students about Women’s Liberation (this emerged as their most burning question). After that, we went back to the textbook’s version of history. But that experience planted in me a highly student-centered vision of what teaching and learning could be.

Over the next two decades, my vision of student-centered teaching became elaborated as I experimented with my own teaching and became familiar with what others were doing. The American Psychological Association put forth a framework of learner-centered principles (McCombs, 2003), which supported meaning-making approaches to teaching. One such meaning-making approach for teaching literacy, for example, came to be known as whole language (Goodman, 1982). A significant body of work documented the academic and social benefits of teaching through cooperative learning (Sharan & Sharan, 1992), a pedagogical process I stumbled on as a learning disabilities teacher. Since so many White teachers fail to teach students of color well, forms of pedagogy that engage students of color were documented, including Ladson-Billings (1994) exemplary work on culturally relevant teaching. Education that reclaims Indigenous cultures and languages took shape in several parts of the world such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States (May, 1999). While I do not intend to paint an overly rosy picture of the 1970s and 1980s, in many schools and classrooms in different countries there were teachers placing students at the center of learning and viewing them as whole people who brought into the classroom their histories, communities, languages, cultures, and wonderings that serve as the foundation for further learning.

This paradigm was attacked in the late 1990s. In the United States, states were directed to establish content standards, and align curriculum and test batteries to them. Student test scores would drive not only how schools were evaluated, but ultimately whether any given school would continue to stay open. Fairly quickly, what student-centered teaching had existed gave way to test-driven teaching. Valli and Chambliss (2007) captured the difference between the two paradigms as they studied a school in transition. One of their studies compared the literacy teaching of a teacher as she taught one group of students whose achievement scores were at least adequate, and another group whose scores were not. With the first group, the teacher selected reading material based partly on student interest, encouraged students to make meaning of stories, and to connect reading and writing with their lives outside school; she guided discussions to prompt their thinking about the text. Conversely, with the students who had scored poorly on tests, the very same teacher’s goal became preparing them to score better. To this end, she constructed her teaching as test preparation rather than literacy acquisition (Valli & Chambliss, 2007). As federal and state policies mandated test-driven teaching, teachers’ attention to their students as holistic people diminished.

Teachers delivering a fairly standardized curriculum to students in batches was not new; indeed, this had been the predominant model of schooling in many countries for a long time, and was arguably the predominant model in the United States (Goodlad, 1984). But neoliberalism solidified this model on a global scale, tying schooling firmly to standardized testing and business models of operation. According to Tabb (2002), neoliberalism stresses “the privatization of the public provision of goods and services—moving their provision from the public sector to the private—along with deregulating how private producers can behave, giving greater scope to the single-minded pursuit of profit” (p. 29). Neoliberal reforms emphasize privatization, market-based competition, and accountability; it frames education as a private commodity rather than a public good. Test scores are treated much like profit in that the goal is to maximize both. Students are treated as products, standardized as much as possible by being taught the same curriculum (many schools expect teachers at each grade level to be on the same page at the same time), then tested regularly on their mastery of it, and schools are evaluated on test score production. For the past two or three decades, neoliberalism has shaped education policy in many nations, including the United States (Hursh, 2007), Chile (Redondo, 2007), New Zealand, Australia (Davies & Bansel, 2007), and Spain (Aguado-Odina, Mata-Benito, & Gil-Jaurena, 2017). As a result, we now have cohorts of teacher candidates whose entire school experience has been framed by scripted curriculum, pacing guides, and testing.

Yet results of this paradigm are less than impressive. In the United States, for example, student learning on measures such as the National Assessment of Education Progress has stagnated; achievement gaps have either remained constant or grown (Braithwaite, 2016). At the same time, a rich tradition of research connects learning to cognitive activity (e.g., Greeno, 2006), social interaction (Ball, 2009; Vygotsky, 1978), cultural context (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Rogoff, 2003), and cultural and political relevance (Ladson-Billings, 1994; Sleeter, 2011). Due to a tension between engaging diverse students in meaningful and authentic learning, and the less than stellar impact of test-driven teaching, we are seeing some loosening of what teachers can do. That opportunity now presents a challenge that the following story illustrates.

Several years ago, I was at a conference attended by teacher educators and several teacher candidates. One session focused on student-centered teaching, such as uses of learning centers and inquiry projects. Toward the end of the session, a teacher candidate, looking clearly flustered, raised her hand to speak. She pointed out that the older teacher educators in the room were describing ways of teaching they had experienced that sounded wonderful. But she was having difficulty visualizing what it might look like to use cooperative learning or learning centers, since her entire schooling experience had consisted of standardized content taught through teacher-centered pedagogy. I began to wonder: What happens if teachers have an opportunity to teach in more student-centered and culturally responsive ways than they experienced as students? Experience certainly does shape what we think is possible, reflected in the flustered teacher candidate’s reaction. Yet my own experience of learning to teach includes many instances of trying out practices I had not experienced, and there is some debate in the literature about the extent to which teachers actually model their teaching after the ways they were taught (Cox, 2014).

Given the preponderance of teacher-centered approaches to teaching, but the possibility of more student-centered and culturally responsive approaches, this special issue was curated to grapple with challenges and possibilities. Articles examine the process of figuring out pedagogy that values and works constructively with students’ identities, communities, cultures, and languages, particularly the challenges involved when teachers themselves have not seen such pedagogy in practice.

The first three articles explore wiggle room elementary and secondary teachers can find in fairly standardized contexts. In “Navigating Standardized Spaces in Student Teaching,” Buchanan, Byard, Ferguson, Billings, Dana, and Champagne explore the tension between student-centered and culturally responsive beliefs about teaching, and classroom contexts that are highly scripted and teacher-centered. The authors (five student teachers and their professor) use the concepts of strategy and tactic to frame how they responded to tensions they encountered between demands of their student teaching placements and their own emerging student-centered teaching philosophies. Each author shares stories about confronting and navigating this tension in their classroom practice while student teaching. Interestingly, while conversing informally with cooperating teachers, the professor (Rebecca Buchanan) realized that some of them were also struggling with the same tension in their own work.

Marinho and Delgado document the practice of a teacher who was learning to construct curriculum around students’ everyday knowledge. In “A Curriculum in Vocational Courses: The Recognition and (Re)Construction of Counterhegemonic Knowledge,” the authors conceptualize the classroom as a community of practice, in which teachers can build on students’ funds of knowledge to create what they call a “practiced curriculum.” This kind of curriculum, co-constructed with students, recontextualizes academic learning in ways that engage students’ lives. Their case study highlights a ninth grade teacher of vocational courses for students who are on the verge of dropping out of school, showing students’ highly positive responses to this reconstructed student-centered curriculum and pedagogy.

MacGregor, Chappell Belcher, and Fitch, in “Reclaiming Your Time: Tools From Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) for Making General Interventions Local,” collaborate on a reflection of their own experiences as teachers in order to extract insights from which new teachers may be able to learn. They are particularly concerned with ways in which teachers can learn to enact culturally sustaining pedagogy and place-based education that draws on Indigenous knowledge. Because teaching is never a finished product but always a process of becoming, the authors share a-ha and breakthrough moments in their own practice, as well as missed opportunities they recognized later. They challenge readers to see themselves as ongoing learners who are able to identify space to practice student-centered, place-based, and culturally sustaining pedagogy, in whatever setting they find themselves.

The next three articles explore possibilities in teacher education. In “Race and the Mona Lisa: Reflecting on Antiracist Teaching Practice,” Khasnabis, Goldin, Perouse-Harvey, and Hanna present a case study of two White teacher candidates learning to position themselves as learners while dialoging with a Black parent about a racial issue, in the context of a carefully crafted simulation. For many White teachers, being learners in the context of such a dialog is a new experience that may feel threatening. This innovative simulation, with its scaffolded reflection support by the course instructor, is designed to develop teacher candidates’ ability to participate in and learn from such dialogs. The authors offer excerpts from the two simulated dialogs that pinpoint moments in which the teacher candidates either invited and picked up on what the parent said, or ignored and even blocked what she was attempting to say. The teacher candidates then reflected on the dialogs, with prompts from the instructor encouraging them to dig more deeply into how they had positioned themselves and how that positioning affected the dialog.

Averill and McRae, in “Culturally Sustaining Initial Teacher Education: Developing Student Teacher Confidence and Competence to Teach Indigenous Learners,” describe and analyze how their program at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, prepares teachers who can constructively teach Indigenous Maori students. The authors propose and use a framework distinguishing among various program responses toward this goal, showing how their program was transformed. Key was the development of a Maori Education Group of Advisors, who have had input into the full range of the program. The authors share exciting aspects of the program, such as teaching Maori-focused courses in Maori community space. Throughout, they show that student teachers can learn to teach in culturally responsive ways when their teacher preparation program embodies this paradigm.

In “Fugitive Teacher Education: Nurturing Pedagogical Possibilities in Early Childhood Education,” Lees and Vélez explore the radical transformation of early childhood education brought about by a student-led community who were participating in both a Social Justice Education minor and the Early Childhood Degree program. They situate this transformation within a critique of neoliberal standards-based education that places economic needs over human needs and teaching content over developing children. The authors examine a fugitive space that emerged in the overlap between these two programs; it was located within but not controlled by the university. Within that space, students reconstructed their understanding and practice of early childhood education based on social justice principles. This study offers a fascinating portrait of how education within a neoliberal standards-based context can be substantively transformed around child- and family-centered principles.

In the final article, “Arabyyah and Mexicana Co-Teaching-Learning Testimonios of Revolutionary Women: A Decolonizing Pedagogy of Solidarity,” Hamzeh and Flores Carmona discuss how they radically transformed the nature of pedagogy in a university course. Their pedagogy completely upends the “banking” model in which a professor dispenses decontextualized knowledge to students, then evaluates them on how well they consumed that knowledge. Hamzeh and Flores Carmona team taught an innovative course that focused on the lives and work of revolutionary women confronting oppression, and used testimonio and pláticas to document their process. As co-teachers, they positioned themselves as co-learners with their students, and students as evaluators of their own learning. They framed knowledge itself as deeply personal and meaningful to learners, a distinct contrast to abstractions for consumption.

Collectively, these articles richly portray pushback against standardized, test-driven teaching, in both K–12 settings and higher education. In all seven articles, educators claim space for student-centered learning, particularly learning that is culturally relevant to the local context. In some cases, that space is limited, such as the student teachers working in standards-based classrooms, using what agency they have in that context. In other cases, that space is very broad, as in the course Hamzeh and Flores Carmona co-taught. Nonetheless, all seven articles embrace possibility, authors grappling with enacting a teaching process they did not experience when they were students, or moving beyond what they had experienced as students. As such, this collection pays tribute to the innovative power of educators who are driven by a vision of teaching and learning that centers students, context, and authentic learning.