Who Am I/Who are they?

3/26/2024

It's a bit serendipitous that our readings tonight speak to identity, identity formation, and ideology. One thing the reading from this evening is trying to do is make visible the way these things are often seen as invisible in spaces where writing is happening--and in the writing produced in these spaces

For this asynchronous class post, I want to help you to make visible who you are as a researcher and who you are researching. And I also simply want to help you draft your ethnography/case study.

Please post roughly 500 words that positions you as the researcher in your study AND positions the students and their writing. Think of this demographically--age, race, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background. That's the kind of thing that applies to both the observe and the observed.

But, from your end, who are you or who do you think you are as an educator in the classroom? What are your values and biases that you bring with you as you try to observe the writing space and writing activities that fill it? In other word, what is your identity as you enter into this project and what is your ideology you are operating under?

This material may not appear in the lump it will appear here in this space, but hopefully you'll find ways to use this material in your paper.

No need to respond to each other. This is a space for me to read and respond. Much like we did outloud in class last week, I'll try to give feedback and ask questions meant to help all of you as you move through the project.

FOR NEXT WEEK: Continuing our trend of sort of pre-drafting as we go, please be ready to post and/or discuss what preliminary things you are noticing about your site of writing.

8 Comments

Cassie Peterson

3/26/2024 03:17:44 pm

The question that I would like to address in my ethnography is as follows: how do I encourage students in my E block english class to revise their essays instead of taking a zero? For background context. My classes are required to submit 2 drafts when they complete an essay. This includes a rough draft and a final draft. I give students feedback on their rough drafts, and they revise based on my feedback. However, there are few students who normally turn in their final drafts. On the last essay we completed, 9 out of 20 students did not revise their essays and took a zero. That is almost half of the class. I have theories as to why this happens, but I would like to look at it in more detail. For my ethnography, my plan is to give students a survey about how likely they are to revise, offer revision on their essay, and possibly interview select students based on the results found in the survey.
To describe myself as a researcher: I am a third year 8th and 9th grade teacher feeling the pressure to perform well. This is the year that I am up for professional teacher status, and due to a number of changing circumstances, I am stressed. This year a new department head took over, who has a very narrow view of what teaching writing and reading should look like. I struggle to fit into that narrow view. I feel that I have an interesting perspective. While I acknowledge my privilege as a white woman, I am also autistic and queer. I am open to viewing problems from multiple perspectives, and like clear data and feedback. It is my philosophy that all students are capable of learning if we provide them with the right tools. I am against the idea of the teacher doing all the work though. The angel archetype of the classroom teacher "doing good work for nothing in return" is something I find detrimental. I'd much rather see improvement, engagement, and fair wages for teachers.
I have a large classroom where I painted the walls green. It is a soft seaglass color, and I don't use the overhead lights. There are fairy lights circling each whiteboard, mushroom and foliage stickers on the walls, and a living “poet-tree” in the corner. There are two teacher desks, as I share the room with another young teacher. I grouped the desks in tables of four. Student work is displayed on a rotating basis on the walls. Out of 20 students in my E block class, only 7 are white, I have 9 students that identify as black, and 4 students who identify as Latinx. Two of my students in this class are on 504 plans, 4 are FELs with limited proficiency in English, and a large portion of my class is bilingual (portuguese or spanish). They like activities related to speaking and arguing, but dislike reading and writing. During writing assignments, I have frequently received half-done, incomplete, or blank organizers and worksheets. They are an 8th grade class of students, but reading comprehension testing scores them at an average 5th grade reading level. They want to do well, but I’m not sure how to best help them do that, so I hope this ethnography will help me to boost engagement with the revision process.

Kasey P

3/26/2024 03:21:24 pm

My current problem for the class I’m observing is work completion of longer form writing assessments. This group has difficulty completing writing prompts that have formatting that follows provided guidelines. I approach this as a researcher trying to figure out a solution to this problem. I have been an educator for six years and am in the process of completing my Master’s in English. These two factors have given me plenty of familiarity with not just the material, but different strategies and approaches to use when working with diverse or struggling groups of students. Additionally, all of my years have been spent at this school, so I am familiar with the culture of the school quite well. One area of bias though may be the fact that this class is the first 9th grade course I have taught that includes students that are from other schools. This can impact my perception of their actions or writing ability as I don’t have a background in their previous schooling. Another reality of this research though is that I am taking on an issue within my own class. Though it can be hard to be fully impartial, I am a fairly self-aware and honest teacher when it comes to my own process. While discovering the issues that students encounter with writing, I consider myself willing to learn and adapt based on the results of the experiment.
For this particular problem, the research I propose involves assigning weekly writing assignments that require students to repeat a writing structure based on a prompt that uses passages provided from a text. Students will be given a consistent time frame to complete these writings, the only changing factor being the passages provided to the student for each assignment. The students will have access to sentence stems, transition words or phrases, a passage for each assignment, and a google slides that details the elements of an essay. Each of these elements will be available for every single writing prompt.
The classroom environment has no overhead lighting, and instead utilizes a series of string lights around the room. There is a sign that reads “Hate has no home here” and a series of pride flags on the windowsill. The desks are all in pairs in a stadium seating fashion (angled towards the front) facing the board and teacher’s desk. The teacher’s desk has a zen garden and light up dinosaurs that kids will occasionally come up and take to keep at their desks. There is also a student zone where students can grab extra copies of work, extra credit opportunities, books, journals for the class, and there is a large calendar with major dates for students. Objectives are listed at the front and student work is displayed on multiple board locations. There is high diversity of students within the class. The class is fairly evenly split by gender, consisting of 7 girls and 9 boys. The class of 16 includes 6 ELs and 2 FELs and includes Latin, Hispanic, and white students. The student reading levels range from fourth to tenth grade.

Devon Melo

3/26/2024 03:35:33 pm

What I understand my problem to be is based on the following questions:
What is the understanding of teaching writing process for an Honor vs. a College Prep student?
How do I engage in this process vs. how does my co-teacher at the tenth grade level?
Do we (collectively) demand students to engage in this writing process more in Honors or College Prep?
What factors like setting or classroom management determine this?

I am coming into this as a young, third year teacher, fresh into their career, to reflect on my teaching practices and how I can strengthen them in all my classes. I want to align all my classes on the same playing field, and hold students to high standards at all levels as best I can. A major part of why I am feeling I engage in different ways of teaching writing to each "level" of student is due to the fact that where I teach, there is not a "strict" policy on writing.

The location is a small suburban high school in Massachusetts. As of 2022, the demographics are majority 81.6% White, 7.2% African Americans, 5.8% Hispanic, and 4.1% Multi-Race or Non-Hispanic student population. There are 877 students total enrolled here, with 389 female, 486 male, and 2 nonbinary students (Mass Dept. of Education). There are 36.9% high needs, 25.7% low income, and 17.3% students with disabilities population.

My specific setting includes three sections of English 12 Honors students - 65 in total. In addition, I teach two sections of English 10 College Prep - 39 in total, and one section of a 9-12 English elective called Foundations of Journalism, which is 25 students in total. My room is located on the third floor. It's painted a light yellow which I'm told by veteran teachers that when the new building was being completed over ten years ago, the contractors described it as the, "ultimate color for learning." The kids laugh at that constantly. I have almost all of my wall space covered with student work, random ELA figurative language posters, bulletin boards with my favorite novel quotes, and so forth. I use one light switch to turn on half the lights during instruction and leave my blinds open to overlook the small yard space in the center of our school. In addition, our department is pretty young. ⅚ teachers are less than ten years into their career (including myself). Our department does not follow a clear pacing guideline for our courses. We utilize a paid curriculum platform called, Study Sync which has premade unit plans and assessment materials, however it's mostly supplemented into our teaching. I also create a lot of my own stuff or take inspo from other online teaching platforms

I operate or try to be as student centered with my practice as I can be. I write besides my students and try to model the task in which I'm asking of. I know my students want to do well, but at times don't want to do the work. I question how I can be challenging and engaging without making it be a chore for them. I definitely operate under process pedagogy in the pre-writing stage with my students. As the year has progressed, I've experimented with more flexibility with myself and have expressed for my classes too, as well. However, I struggle with allowing my CP students to do this due to behavior issues.

Devon

3/26/2024 03:41:21 pm

I am going to try and eliminate my bias/view by talking out some of my observations with my good friend, and co-teacher, who also teaches 10th. However, I know there will be some there when I complete my draft, I am a pretty reflective person, so hopefully that will help me readjust. I am a white, straight woman, who has never been discriminated against. I also teach in a pretty big conservative area, where being liberal is frowned upon. However, I am aware of my place and do my best to create a safe space. I am mindful of that when it comes to all students and teaching students how to be respectful to others.

Peyton DiTullio

3/27/2024 05:36:38 am

Going into this ethnography study, my “problem” is that students are used to being assessed on the product and not the process. This means that students do not engage much in the writing process, they mostly engage with the submission process as that is the part they are being graded on. Sometimes this results in sloppy writing and/or plagiarized writing. Traditionally, when students submit a piece of writing, it is very transactional- they turn it in, it is graded, then it is handed back. Even if the teacher leaves extensive feedback and corrections, there is no guarantee the students will go back and revise their writing, or even read the feedback/corrections. I want to address this problem by researching how students manage the writing process when writing in class. As a researcher, I am coming into this ethnography study with an open mind and understanding that the writing process looks different for different students. I also am coming into this knowing the demographics of those students are very similar in some ways, and different in others. Many of my students are white, middle/upper-class students; 94% of the student body at Duxbury High School consists of this demographic. However, I do acknowledge that there are a couple of students in my classroom who are not white and do not fall into the same socio-economic status. There is also a large range of abilities among the students. In my ethnography study, I will be focusing on two sophomore classes consisting of 38 students total, 15 of which are girls and 23 of which are boys. One of these classes is a co-taught college prep level class of 20 students. The other class is an honors level class of 18 students. In both classes, students are organized in table groups consisting of anywhere between 3-5 students. Each table group has a variety of students who perform at a variety of different levels. However, in the honors class, there is one table group that consists of gifted students only. As the primary teacher of both classes, I only have three years of experience as an English teacher, however, I have three years of experience in special education as well.

Nick

4/7/2024 03:14:07 pm

I am a 26 year old white male teaching at Fairhaven High School, a middle-class suburb of New Bedford, Massachusetts. I earned my B.S> in Secondary Education with an English concentration in the spring of 2020 at Fitchburg State University. Fitchburg State is a Massachusetts state college known for its strong education program, and it is here that I received my initial teacher’s license. I began teaching at Fairhaven High School in the winter of 2021. It was at this time that I also began my Master’s Degree program at Bridgewater State University, another Massachusetts state college known for its education programs. As a part of my Master’s program, I began an ethnographic study on the students of Fairhaven High School, focusing on the culture of work completion in English classrooms. I chose to observe a sophomore English class taught by a fellow teacher, Mr. Carr.

Mr. Carr is a white male in his mid 30’s. Mr. Carr is the second most senior English teacher in Fairhaven High School’s English department, and teaches a range of classes from “ramp-up” freshman English, sophomore English, and AP Junior Language and Composition. The class that I chose to observe was Mr. Carr’s A block sophomore English CP class.

Mr. Carr’s A block sophomore English class meets at 7:40 am, and runs for roughly 50 minutes. The class contains approximately 15 students, ranging from 14 to 16 years old. These students largely come from the towns of Fairhaven and Acushnet, MA. These students have diverse backgrounds, with the majority of the students being of white or Portuguese heritage. The towns of Fairhaven and Acushnet are low to middle-class suburbs of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a medium sized city located on the south shore of Massachusetts. The class is a CP, or college prep class, and so has a wider range of students with differing academic skillsets.

During my observations of Mr. Carr’s class, I tried to keep in mind my own biases as a researcher. As an English teacher myself, I may have taught the class differently than Mr. Carr. The differences in our teaching styles and methods of classroom management was one of my biases that I kept in mind during my observation. Acknowledging that this classroom was one where I am an “outsider”, and that the norms and roles that are usually demonstrated in my classroom may not necessarily be the norms and rules that are demonstrated in Mr. Carr’s class helped my locate myself in the space and settle better into my role as observer.

Sara Mc

4/9/2024 03:49:42 pm

I am a first-year teacher who teaches in a large urban district in southern Massachusetts. Demographically, I have students from all types of racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. The majority of my students speak English as a first language. However ,I have about 30 students who are FLEP (former English language learners). For many of these students, you would never know that they don't speak English as their first language. However, for some of my students, this is more apparent. I have a mix of 9th and 10th grade students. I have more female students than male students.

My classroom is high-tech as my school was recently built and this is our second year using the school. My students each have their own chromebook and gmail/ Google account. In my classroom, I have whiteboards, projectors, and even a microphone with surround sound.

As an educator, I am young and new to the field. I lack the experience that many of my colleagues have. I come from a middle class family and I do not speak any other languages other than English. Therefore, some students can see themselves in me and others cannot. This makes me realize that I need to eliminate bias I have in the classroom as I am not diverse. I do my best to make my room a safe place by speaking kindly and maintaining patience with all students.

In my case study, I am trying to explore "writer's block" and what prevents my students from being as successful as they can be during the writing process. I want to see my students in a more holistic light and not judge them solely on their writing and academic performance. I want to use my findings to tweak my instruction so that the writing process becomes something that invigorates my students and empowers them.

check Gloria at linkedin link

9/15/2024 11:41:34 pm

Reflecting on the intersection of identity and research, it's crucial to recognize the ways our own backgrounds and ideologies shape our observations and interpretations. As researchers, we bring our own experiences—such as age, race, gender, and socio-economic status—into the classroom, influencing how we perceive and engage with students' writing and identities. This self-awareness helps us better understand our positionality and the biases that may affect our observations. It also prompts us to consider how students' diverse identities and backgrounds shape their writing practices and perspectives. By making these factors visible, we not only enrich our analysis but also contribute to a more nuanced and empathetic understanding of the writing space and the individuals within it.

Who Am I/Who are they?

Leave a Reply.

ENGL 513

Archives

Categories