Points of Leverage: Navigating Tensions between Socio-Culturally Relevant Teaching and Accountability Pressures

This qualitative study explores how an elementary teacher navigated tensions between accountability and bilingual learners‘ needs. Questions included: How did a teacher employ students‘ socio-cultural resources in content areas? How did accountability shape use of resources? What are points of leverage—i.e., promising instructional practices to be further developed and harnessed—to meet student needs? Findings show how Ms. Montclair briefly connected to students‘ resources, focusing on making content comprehensible, transmitting information, staying on pace, and practicing testing. Although familiar with project-based and family/community-oriented learning, accountability measures impacted instruction. Yet promising instruction integrates socio-cultural resources to promote innovation and meaning. Ms. Montclair:When you go to these meetings some people will be sitting there like, ―What page are you on?‖ Researcher: Really, district meetings? Ms. Montclair:Yah, they‘ll be like, everybody is in the theme dah, dah, dah. You should be in Theme 2 by now, right? In this era of accountability, bilingual third grade teacher Ms. Montclair (pseudonym) described the pressure to keep up with other grade level teachers and to cover the content of the curriculum. District meetings took place within a context of control and fidelity to curriculum. Ms. Montclair made instructional decisions in part based on her own expertise from years of experience and higher-level decisions and pacing charts. She saw the importance of doing project-based learning, tapping into children‘s cultural repertoires, and adhering to curriculum mandates. Teachers in the 21 st century, like Ms. Montclair, understand the worth of attending to students‘ linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds while working within political and administrative contexts that shape curriculum and instruction. Ms. Montclair recognized the importance of tapping into a family‘s socio-cultural resources, often marginalized or under-utilized. In an interview, she talked about past success with project-based learning, before curricular reforms, describing a unit about building machines. One year we did a project where they built bridges at home, using recycled materials. We did that a couple years in a row. They had to write about it, they had to bring it, show it and explain how they did it…. One kid brought in a bridge and he‘s like, ―My bridge is so strong, you could even stand on it.‖ …We‘re putting weights on it, lamps on it; he brought this little bridge and I could stand on it. All these kids, whose moms were usually the ones to help with homework, were out in the garage with dads or tíos making stuff. A lot of kids made them out of straws and scotch tape, but a lot of kids went to the shop…. Their dads work in construction…. That‘s the kind of thing you could do while still doing book work. But something‘s got to give because there‘s so much in there. While recognizing power in hands-on projects that connected children to parents‘ skills and 1 McIntosh Ciechanowski: Points of Leverage: Navigating Tensions between Socio-Culturally Published by PDXScholar, 2011 48 NORTHWEST PASSAGE, 9(2) knowledge, Ms. Montclair also acknowledged the need to do ―book work‖ to cover curriculum as specified by the district, describing tension with covering curriculum and doing meaningful projects. Work such as construction can provide important funds of knowledge, especially in Latino families that may have valuable employment-related intellectual resources like building and carpentry (Moll, Amanti, Neff, and Gonzalez, 2005). Relevant projects keep children engaged, especially those from marginalized groups (Moje, Collazo, Carrillo, & Marx, 2001). Multicultural or bilingual teachers are caught in a double-bind in which they experience tensions when drawing on cultural resources as they try to engage in relevant and responsive instruction for their diverse student population (Achinstein and Ogawa, 2011). Teachers face demands of standardization, knowledge transmission, and test scores that may cause conflict when trying to teach with culturally-relevant, collaborative, and social justice approaches. In some cases, these conflicts can be turned into ―productive tension‖ in which the teacher is motivated and given opportunities to develop professionally and create innovative instruction (Stillman, 2011). Teachers negotiate the in-between spaces to find middle ground between mandated requirements and their own expertise about effective instruction. Research needs to explore how teachers, even at beginning stages, create innovative spaces and find dynamic moments that lay the groundwork for productive practices. To bring to light how cultural tools, social networks, and resources can be recruited as strengths in schools, this study uses the term points of leverage, which means that students‘ own connections or meaning-making processes are leveraged or used as sites for learning. This study does not take a romantic view or assume that it is easy, effortless, or automatic to use students‘ cultural and social practices as assets in the classroom. Yet, by examining these resources and a teacher‘s ways of making use of them, these resources can be further leveraged by teachers to better serve the educational needs of 21 st century learners in diverse contexts. This article explores the tensions faced by an experienced teacher and how she negotiated staying on pace and employing students‘ socio-cultural resources in social studies and science. Specifically, this study highlights points of leverage, potential sites to be further developed to enhance student learning. In-between spaces hold promise for allowing teachers to effectively negotiate tensions between utilizing student resources and staying true to the curriculum. Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives The next sections explore accountability contexts and teaching approaches for diversity. Teaching Context: Accountability, Bureaucracy, and Testing In this era of accountability, it has become typical to encounter standards-based curriculum, high-stakes testing, standardization of instruction, and administrative or bureaucratic control over teachers and school practices. Teachers with the best of intentions and who know what works with their students are being pressured into teaching in ways that are less than desirable (Sheldon and Biddle, 1998). The emphasis on student test performance and the increase in district, state, and federal control over what teachers do in their classrooms can lead to a narrow set of instructional practices. ―When strong emphasis is placed on tests and how student performances ̳stack up,‘ teachers may narrow their curriculum, teach to the test, or encourage students to focus only on knowing how to get the right answers to test-type questions‖ (Sheldon and Biddle, 1998, p. 174). With stricter mandates for how to teach content, teachers 2 Northwest Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 9, Iss. 2 [2011], Art. 4 https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/nwjte/vol9/iss2/4 DOI: 10.15760/nwjte.2012.9.2.4 FALL 2011 49 may shelf hands-on activities, store away boxes of art and creative supplies, and bring forth practice sheets and test-like activities to enhance testing performance and evade sanctions. In this process, students‘ ability to think broadly and flexibly is stifled (Ovando, Combs, and Collier, 2008). And, visuals, kinesthetic or theatrical performance, and multisensory scaffolding (Herrell and Jordan, 2011) that greatly benefit not only English language learners (ELLs) but all students may become less commonplace as textbooks and restrictive curricula become the norm. A number of types of accountability exist in education today (Darling-Hammond, 2004; McDermott, 2007). Darling-Hammond (2004) describes one type, bureaucratic accountability, as when ―federal, state, and district offices promulgate rules and regulations intended to ensure that schooling takes place according to set procedures‖ (p. 1050). These rules standardize delivery of instruction, often with the purpose of achieving equitable educational contexts, but can be counterproductive when students have specific needs requiring differentiated instruction. Under certain mandates, teachers lack flexibility to organize and shape instruction to meet the needs of all their charges. Darling-Hammond describes how urban public schools have been especially affected by ―educational procedures, prescribed curriculum and texts, and test-based accountability strategies…‖ (p. 1051). In this way, school systems are ―the epitome of topdown, undemocratic bureaucracy‖ (Ingersoll, 2003, p. 7). Top-down mandates about what to teach, how and when to teach it, and how to assess what is learned leave little room for teachers to make informed and professional decisions about how to meet students‘ needs. Issues of accountability cannot be separated from understanding how teaching occurs within a larger institutional context and the appropriateness of student learning opportunities. Teaching Approaches: Connection, Conversation, Culture, and Content Most 21 st century classrooms have significant cultural and linguistic diversity; thus, teachers need research-based approaches that provide rich learning opportunities for all students. Connections to Real Life. Moll, Amanti, Neff, and Gonzalez (2005) suggest utilizing student, family, and community resources to transform the quality of instruction in schools, reducing rote-like instruction and promoting relevant teaching. These researchers focus on children usually considered to be ―poor‖ and illuminate their socio-cultural affordances that would enhance teaching and learning. Participating families have substantial knowledge about construction and building, farming and animal management, cooking, and folk medicine linked to curricular areas such as science, math, or social studies.