Moving on the the paper... (as a warning to whomever reads this, I was really into this article and what was being said. I had a lot of, probably, unimportant thoughts on this teacher that I included as well. I rambled on at some points as well.)
After reading only a few paragraphs, I noticed something very wrong with this situation. Pg. 65 says "Ms. Jones' class had a reputation among some of the other teachers in the school as having particularly difficult group of children, and four of the students in the class saw the school counselors regularly." Further on, Toothy says, "Ms. Jones believed that my descriptions... were accurate. She felt that the specific practices of her classroom had been necessary because of it's specific circumstances, which she interpreted somewhat differently than I did. She mentioned that she had been acutely aware that her classroom was located immediately adjacent to the school library and to an intermediate classroom, and she felt this placement meant she had to be extra vigilant in making sure her students were not noisy or disruptive. She also thought that the particular combination of children in her classroom presented extra challenges." She further quotes Ms. Jones on pg. 67 with an indented paragraph. Finally, Toothy says "[Ms. Jones'] practices needed to be congruent with those of the other teachers in the school. My point in all of this? This so called "ESL" teacher more concerned about her appearance and status among her fellow colleagues than about the wellbeing of her students. Had she paid more attention to their needs as learners than trying to keep the quite, she may have had an easier time. I felt a little bad for these children who had a terrible experience with a teacher. I remember having bad experiences with teachers and how it affected my learning and interactions.
The following page says, however, that next year's procedures were based on her own beliefs.
Hopefully she did a better job.
Toothy pulls off some awesome research here. She uses three seemingly unconscious habits to prove the "breaking up" of the classroom. I like what she says: "the reinforcement of the conviction that each child was an individual learner who, on his or her own, negotiated classroom life and internalized more or less efficiently the intellectual and linguistic resources provided by the classroom teacher." I assume Toothy means that students are going to copy the teacher's attitude that "your work is your work" and enforce it among their peers. Students also copied teacher's interactions and relations with the other students and acted "teacherly."
She observes the classroom layout and how that interfered with learning. If you have children who are better learners, then shouldn't you put them beside the children who need help? Can't they learn to help each other? Of course not, because the teacher instructed everyone like little soldiers to do their own work, which is touched on later. Student positioning, in my opinion, has a lot to do with learning. You shouldn't put students in assigned seating. That just tells them that they're incapable of choosing a seat. However, if you're teaching bilingual students, you shouldn't let same speakers sit near each other because then they just talk. This was a problem during my Goethe Institut classes in Munich. All the Russian students sat together and spoke Russian. All the Italian students sat together and spoke Italian. All the American students sat together and spoke English. And what happened? A German class where no German was spoken. Our teacher finally had enough and split us up. We all started speaking German because we had to.
Toothy also comments on Amy and Surjeet getting up during story time and going to their desk and doing other things. In the footnotes it says that Ms. Jones "found this to be a common pattern for many of the ESL children she had taught and believed that it reflected the children's lack of understanding the stories." Obviously Ms. Jones is oblivious to her own thoughts. If you knew why this was happening, why wouldn't you do anything about it? This brings up a previous student... anyone remember who it was? It was Ivan, the Russian student who didn't want to be apart of the x-mas holiday play. Does this sound like maybe Amy and Surjeet were not accepting of this idea because it assigned the role of a child as opposed to a learner? Is their resistance practice to centrally defined classroom activities because they didn't understand or because they didn't feel it was beneficial to their learning? I dunno, maybe the Toothy should have asked them. I'm sure she read Peirce's article at some point previous to this.
The idea of borrowing was a great idea to study children's interactions. It posed some valuable points as well. These cute little 6 and 7 year old kids were not only forced to sit at their desks, but now they can't even share crayons. This makes a lot of sense. Their parent's had to replace these materials as well. Not such a bad idea but school supplies are expensive and that's why we pay taxes, so students can have the necessary supplies to learn. ANYWAY, Ms. Jones didn't always approve of the children borrowing things because they were moving around and using things that weren't theirs. Okay, Teach children to sit still and use their own things. But don't punish them when they need too because your cheap school district wont provided necessary learning materials. Material borrowing is a great way for casual conversation to take place and I don't understand why the teacher didn't encourage this. It would have halted, maybe, the tenseness felt by Surjeet when she asked Mary for something.
Toothy summarizes borrowing, saying "From the above description, it seems evident that borrowing and lending practices in this classroom were reflective of the social relations of the children therein." Some of the children didn't lend their materials to students or they were rude when said students asked them for their items. I think this is a reflection of their seating arrangements. The arrangements were based on proficiency. More advanced at the back and vise versa. Children are intelligent and I think they would pick up on this and base their interactions on this idea of advance knowledge. They may have perceived the up front students as less intelligent, possibly explaining their hesitation with letting them borrow items because they weren't sure if they would get them back because the other students may loose or take the items, never returning it.
The final section, Toothy describes word usage between students. The teacher and students "made it known that repetitions were illegitimate contributions." Awesome. Tell a 6 or 7 year old that they're not contributing to the class and really diminish their self esteem. Good Job Ms. Jones. Other children participated in reminding students not to copy words, however, they weren't very nice about it.
So overall, I'd say this class did not cultivate knowledge. If anything, it hindered it. Toothy makes a good point that I thought about before even reading it. "The bilingual children I observed had relatively few unobstructed or unsupervised opportunities to speak to peers with whom they customarily chose to interact during unsupervised times at school. Therefore, the opportunities of the bilingual children who were seen as having difficulties to interact with more capable, English speaking peers were curtailed (imposed restriction on)." These children were unable to interact freely with their peers. How is this going to reflect on their future classroom interactions? Will they forever be scared because of this one year? I'm not sure. I hope they are not.
Toothy concludes with a quote from Kanno and Applebaum, "Perhaps it is high time we discarded our romantic notion that if we put children of all ethnic/linguistic backgrounds in one place we will witness the development of true cross-cultural understanding." She quotes Paley, "The group must change its attitudes and expectations towards those who, for whatever reason, are not yet part of the system." She quotes Freire, "The solution is to not integrate them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so they can become beings for themselves." These really resonate after reading this article.
It's impossible to enforce conformity. Any person shouldn't be expected to be something their not. That is why we all have individual thoughts and feelings. I think that if teachers stop looking at their students based on their outside, then learning would be easier and understanding would be universal. That isn't the case. It should be, but it isn't. There is a lot more to each individual student/person than meets the eye. This is the key to being a successful teacher is to understand the individual self and help them form into a comfortable learner. They'll learn and in return, you'll have accomplished your objectives.
I'm done. Hope everyone had a great weekend. See you all on Monday.
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