Learning to Teach English and the Language Arts

A Vygotskian Perspective on Beginning Teachers' Pedagogical Concept Development

Peter Smagorinsky

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350142916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teacher Training

Drawing together Smagorinsky's extensive research over a 20-year period, Learning to Teach English and the Language Arts explores how beginning teachers' pedagogical concepts are shaped by a variety of influences. Challenging popular thinking about the binary roles of teacher education programs and school-based experiences in the process of learning to teach, Smagorinsky illustrates, through case studies in the disciplines of English and the Language Arts, that teacher education programs and classroom/school contexts are not discrete contexts for learning about teaching, nor are each of these contexts unified in the messages they offer about teaching. He explores the tensions, not only between these contexts and others, but within them to illustrate the social, cultural, contextual, political and historical complexity of learning to teach. Smagorinsky revisits familiar theoretical understandings, including Vygotsky's concept development and Lortie's apprenticeship of observation, to consider their implications for teachers today and to examine what teacher candidates learn during their teacher education experiences and how that learning shapes their development as teachers.

1

Vygotsky and Concept Development

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but my father’s parents, born in 1880 and 1885 respectively, were Jewish, and came to the United States from the city of Gomel in the Eastern European country of Byelorussia (now Belarus). In 1896, Lev Vygotsky, also from a Byelorussian Jewish family, was born in Gomel. My grandparents ended up fleeing the pogroms and landing in New York City’s Jewish ghetto on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where my grandfather became a painter of signs for small businesses and where my father was born. Vygotsky stuck around and became the Mozart of Psychology. Much later, after getting my doctorate in 1989, I began reading Vygotsky—my graduate education was more in information processing, a very different paradigm—and developed a strong affinity with his ideas. His perspective has had a powerful effect on my thinking about most things, including what I’ve written for this book. As the old jazz musicians used to say when they heard a serious young talent: “Cat can play.”

The work I synthesize for this book was initially planned using what my CELA colleagues and I called an activity theory framework (Grossman, Smagorinsky, & Valencia, 1999). Pam Grossman and I had an interesting conversation during the course of the data collection, when Pam noted that for all the attention we were giving to contexts and collective activity—an activity theorist imperative—my own approach of focusing on individual cases rather than cohorts presented me with a paradox of sorts. That observation turned out to be very generative for me, contributing to my broader decision to drop claims to conducting research according to an activity theory framework and re-claiming Vygotsky as my theoretical source.

Bakhurst (2007) observes that “despite his emphasis on the sociocultural foundations of psychological development, Vygotsky’s thought remains centred on the individual subject conceived as a discrete, autonomous self” (p. 63). Vygotsky considered the role of contexts in human development to be of paramount importance, and indeed foregrounded social interaction based on cultural-historical patterns and mediational means as the origin of any individual’s cognitive processes. His consideration of social, cultural, and historical mediation in learning to think, however, emerges from the perspective of the individual who appropriates cultural schemata, worldviews, conceptual understandings, and other fundamental aspects of human cognition. His approach is thus amenable to studies that take a cultural-historical perspective, yet do so in service of understanding individual human development in the context of broader collective activity.

Research on teaching has begun to focus on contexts as part of a social turn in educational research (see, for example, the contributors to Smagorinsky, 2006). Historically, teaching has often been depicted as a solitary, lonely, and isolating profession (e.g., Bullough, 1989; Lortie, 1975; Mirel & Golden, 2012). This view has been adopted in recent teacher assessment policies, with teachers individually responsible for raising students’ test scores no matter what has happened in their lives in the past or what issues they might face in the present, facing punitive consequences if they do not (Berliner, 2014). This emphasis on insulated individuals teaching behind closed classroom doors is part of the lore of the teaching profession. Yet this image is deceptive given the dialogic (Bakhtin, 1981) nature of all social interaction; that is, the manner in which thinking and speech are in dialogue with and in intertextual relation with prior human exchanges. This sense of dialogism is fundamentally historical and oriented to speech genres, rather than referring to face-to-face or other immediate forms of talking, in spite of the term’s frequent recruitment to characterize immediate classroom discourse and participatory discussions.

Teachers, no matter how innovative or maverick in their conduct, do not construct each day out of whole cloth. Rather, they draw on conversations—conducted with corporeal people or the texts through which they more broadly communicate—that take place over time, extending back to prior eras. Understanding teachers as historically and socially situated, yet agentive individuals helps to break the binary images of (1) the individual going through biological stages of growth with contextual factors serving primarily to abet that development, and (2) the socially determined individual fated to be the sum of environmental influences and little more.

The case study investigative method provides a promising, if not exclusive, way of getting at how individuals function in social groups, both in terms of what is available for them to appropriate and how they orchestrate a panoply of mediational possibilities into a personalized approach to engaging with the world. Some have interpreted the cultural-historical approach and its various subgroups as fatalistic in that one’s circumstances have much to do with how one conducts life. However, the availability of individual free will and manifold means of mediation provide multiple directions in life, even as social conventions and traditional patterns of cultural dominance curtail such possibilities for people born into less agentive circumstances. Such broad possibilities were not available to all in Vygotsky’s less connected, more parochial, more geographically isolated, and more authoritarian world of Stalin’s rule than is available to most twenty-first-century US teachers.

In this chapter, I lay out how Vygotsky’s formulation of socially situated human cognition has helped lead me to mediated concept development as the primary focus for how people learn to teach. The development of teaching conceptions relies on social-cultural-historical mediation through engagement with others in order to enable one to arrive at a set of beliefs about the purposes of education, the means of instruction, the role of the classroom in the broader practice of schooling, the ultimate ends of human development, the explicit and implicit means by which people’s thinking is externally mediated, and other considerations through which one develops an approach to teaching a particular discipline.

Vygotsky’s major work, Thinking and Speech (1987), elaborates his view of concepts and concept development. In this chapter, I both rely and build on Vygotsky’s outline of concept development in order to construct my own perspective on how people learn to teach, with a focus on my discipline of origin, English/Language Arts, the subject area that provides the emphasis for this research. This academic domain historically has centered on literary interpretation, writing (often about literature), and language use (Applebee, 1974; Pasternak, Caughlan, Hallman, Renzi, & Rush, 2017; Smagorinsky & Whiting, 1995). It has more recently been expanded to include other m odes of composition and reading beyond the printed word and the traditional literary text. It is now as much concerned with linguistic variation as with “standard English,” at least in teacher education if not always in schools (National Council of Teachers of English, 2005); and semiotic notions of textuality have extended the field’s coverage to virtually any sort of composition.

Vygotsky’s (1987) outline of concepts helps to resolve a fundamental problem with learning to teach: the presumed conflict between theory and practice. The disjuncture between theory and practice is involved in the two-worlds pitfall (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985): the differential expectations that beginning teachers face when simultaneously trying to meet the demands of both idealistic and theoretical university faculty and practical school leaders and faculty. I will challenge this dichotomized conception throughout this volume as limited and insufficient, given the abundance of worlds imposing gravitational pulls on teachers. At the surface level, the gap between these two worlds helps explain the limited effects of educational coursework on how education students teach once they begin working in schools, which was the concern that motivated the original conception of the CELA research drawn on for this book. Teachers often complain that teacher education programs are too theoretical; that they emphasize ideals and abstractions at the expense of the pedagogical tools needed for effective practice (Baldassarre, 1997; Gallagher, 1996; Kallos, 1999; Voutira, 1996). In this view, theory and practice are positioned as having different concerns, with university-based faculty espousing elaborated theoretical models that may or may not correspond to how their prospective teachers’ students actually behave, with teacher candidates (TCs) attempting to instruct students under the guidance of mentors who may not adhere to those principles and with students who may not cooperate with theorists’ idealistic representation of them.

The metaphors provided to account for the relation between theory and practice suggest that they are often positioned as separate and competing. Theory is pitted versus practice (e.g., The Colorado Writing Tutors Conference, 2000) or can be put into practice (Kearsley, 1994–2001) or into practitioners (Jackson, 1992), or can translate into practice (Rita, Richey, Klein, & Tracey (2011). The chasm between theory and practice might be bridged (Weaver, 1998), linked (Grisham & Brink, 2000), joined in marriage (Ballenger, 1999), or integrated (Beyer, 1996). This positioning involves a distinct hierarchy, with influence proceeding from theory to practice (ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading English and Communication, 1995). All of these phrasings suggest that theory is the more ethereal and authoritative of these distinct domains, that practice is the more protean and pragmatic dimension, and that some sort of merger ought to be available. Further, from the standpoint of the theorist, theory can and should improve practice, but practice has little effect on theory. This thinking has a long history in university thought (e.g., Brownell, 1948), yet it is rejected as patronizing by those practitioners who study their own teaching (e.g., MacLean & Mohr, 1999).

The dichotomous, hierarchical conception of theoreticians and their theories positioned above practitioners and their practice remains axiomatic among many whose scholarly writing provides the grounds for the debate (Stephens et al., 1999). This common bifurcation of theory and practice misses the point of how people learn. I argue in contrast that Vygotsky’s (1987) exegesis on the concept links abstract understandings and practical activity. Their interdependence is necessary for a person to engage in utilitarian worldly action. I conclude that the problem with teacher education is not too much theory, but too little concept (cf. Cook, Smagorinsky, Fry, Konopak, & Moore, 2002; Smagorinsky, Cook, & Johnson, 2003).

Introduction to Concepts

Vosniadou’s (2008) volume on conceptual change demonstrates how researchers have focused on different processes by which concepts develop for individuals. Taber (2011), in reviewing Vosniadou’s volume, argues that researchers who attend to the social context of development and distributed notions of context do so because it is “easier to access than an intra-mental plane,” that which presumably occurs between the ears, which is out of sight and thus inherently more problematic (p. 5). Vosniadou’s contributors, for the most part, distance themselves from “radical” views that “eschew notions of personal knowledge” (p. 5), and instead focus on the social, cultural, and historical contexts of development. In contrast, the contributors to Vosniadou’s volume regard the individual learner as the primary unit of analysis, with personal learning serving as the focus of research, consistent with the historical tendency to view teachers as isolated individuals.

If Vosniadou’s (2008) collection may be considered to be a state-of-the-art volume of psychological studies of concept development, then the social-cultural-historical approach taken by Vygotsky (1987) would be a minor, perhaps fringe, and possibly “radical” perspective, as argued by Levy (1995) of Michael Cole and Yrjo Engeström, two prominent Vygotskian researchers and activity theorists. I would argue instead that Vygotsky’s framework enables attention to both the social setting of learning to teach and the individual’s orchestration of what is contextually available into a personal conception of teaching. The “radical” perspective eschewed by Vosniadou’s authors may be somewhat of a straw person when this position is construed primarily as positing the presence of a static monoculture and a deterministic sense of destiny imposed by context. As I will demonstrate throughout this book, however, learning to teach involves immersion in many settings—far more than the two arenas of the two-worlds pitfall—that make navigating a conceptual pathway quite challenging and often contradictory. None is particularly fatalistic in its influence, given that it is inevitably contradicted by another available influence. The presence of multiple means of mediation in concept development calls, I believe, for attention not only to context but also to many contexts and their histories and means of mediation in order to understand which aspects of culture are appropriated, and why, for teachers to integrate into a worldview that encompasses how to teach an academic discipline.

Vygotsky and the Conceptual Pathway

Vygotsky (1987) was concerned with the ways in which people construct concepts over time, particularly through their attribution of meaning to words that they learn through cultural engagement. That is, people’s concept development may be ascertained through the ways in which they attribute meaning to a word at different stages of development as mediated by experiences and formal learning. In contrast to the dichotomous approach of focusing on either the social or the personal, Vygotsky viewed concepts as representative of individual mental reconstructions whose associations of meaning find their origins in joint social and cultural practice with others. His early twentieth-century world was far less connected than today’s technology-mediated social environment, perhaps making monocultures more possible. His views thus require adaptation to twenty-first-century conditions that provide far more complex social worlds for individuals and collectives to navigate.

Vygotsky focuses on the manner in which children gravitate to the norms of relatively stable adult communities of practice in which a more-or-less broad social agreement confers a general meaning upon a concept. The meaning available among one group of people might be disputed in other communities of practice, or the concept itself might not be available at all if the social activities associated with it are not locally practiced or imaginable. This view is compatible with the “weak” (i.e., less deterministic) version...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Preface
• 1 Vygotsky and Concept Development
• 2 Methodological Implications of Taking a Vygotskian Approach to Teacher Development
• 3 The Apprenticeship of Observation, Updated, and Its Effects on Beginning Teachers’ Evolving Pedagogical Conceptions
• 4 Concept Development in Teacher Education Coursework and Practica
• 5 Cultures of Color and the Deep Structure of Schools
• 6 Fuzzy Concepts in Teacher Education and Their Consequences in the Classroom
• 7 Policy, Practice, and Disruptions in Concept Development
• 8 School Settings and Course Assignments in Shaping Conceptions of Curriculum and Instruction
• 9 Competing Centers of Gravity within Settings of Learning to Teach
• 10 Learning to Teach Grammar at the Intersection of Formalism and Flexibility
• 11 Community Contexts and Their Societal Settings, and How They Shape Practice
• 12 Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Copyright