Shaping and Reshaping English Knowledge and Praxis through Students’ Voices and Experiences

ABSTRACT

Knowledge and practice refuse to be disconnected from contexts. They always already occupy historical spaces both cultural and personal. Those spaces intersect with lines of inquiry. This essay takes place in the United States in 2020, the fall of the presidential elections, a year marked by Black Lives Matter protests, and the rise of white supremacists. It intersects with the education of its authors while reaching into their thinking about the second year of a five-year continuous improvement project with 14 middle and high schools to address literacy with Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty in a large southern urban school district in States. The thread that ties together the observations, associations, and examples has to do with the ways in which action or praxis in literacy can change teachers’ and students’ beliefs and expectations.

KEYWORDS:

• Culturally relevant
• empathy interviews
• student voice
• Paulo Freire
• personal experience
• dialogic
• english praxis
• high stakes tests

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Empathy interviews originate in the practices of design thinking to gather understandings from and about the experiences of others. They move like conversational interviews; their goal is always to use a human-centred approach to understand others. For our continuous improvement project, we focused the empathy interviews on students’ experiences with school writing, including their thoughts on what they want to write as opposed to what they have to write, and on teachers’ experiences teaching school writing, including their thoughts on what they feel that they have to teach for the state test and what they want to teach for their students’ development as writers.

2. Power Standards by Larry Ainsworth (2003) argues for prioritising the Common Core State Standards by teachers, so that they can be certain to choose to teach the most enduring or important in subject areas. For this example, though, the term refers to state standards chosen as most important to directly teach because they are the most likely to be tested on the state test based on an item analysis of 3–5 years of past tests.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anthony Petrosky

Anthony Petrosky co-directs the Institute for Learning (IFL) at the Learning Research & Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh.  Petrosky currently leads the Institute for Learning Network For School Improvement five-year project, with the Dallas Independent School System. Petrosky’s first collection of poetry, Jurgis Petraskas received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and a Notable Book Award from the American Library Association. As well as two other collections of poetry, Red and Yellow Boat and Crazy Love, he has published widely in the field of English Language Arts and education.

Vivian Mihalakis

Vivian Mihalakis is a Senior programme Officer with the K-12 team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Vivian’s work is focused on supporting networks of secondary schools to use continuous improvement methods to improve outcomes for Black, Latino, and low-income students. Prior to joining the foundation, Vivian was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Learning (IFL) at the University of Pittsburgh where she led the English language arts curriculum and professional development teams.