We take, as point of departure for this inquiry, the event of Amanda Gorman’s reading of her poem... more We take, as point of departure for this inquiry, the event of Amanda Gorman’s reading of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the 2021 US Presidential Inauguration, which did something poems rarely do: resonate widely. Its broad uptake in classrooms and communities suggests that poems are not inert words on a page; instead, they do things. This conception of poetry as a social actor is articulated by theorist Jonathan Culler, whose Theory of the Lyric examines poetry from antiquity through today to identify different social functions of lyric poems. In this paper we take up Culler’s theory and pair it with a number of lyric texts as we wonder and worry about curriculum. What happens if we imagine that curriculum might be good for freeing students (and teachers!) from prosaic perceptions of the world? Or How might curricula, like lyric texts, create communities of care and attention? What we offer, ultimately, is as much curriculum poem as academic study.
International Review of Qualitative Research, 2023
In his hopeful defense of poetry, poet Ben Lerner confesses his contempt for the artform as a kin... more In his hopeful defense of poetry, poet Ben Lerner confesses his contempt for the artform as a kind of bulwark against the disappointment inherent in the writing and reading of poetry. Actual poems never do justice to the “transcendent impulse” that drives the poet to language, he argues, but that fact ought not provoke a rejection of Poetry. Instead, he advocates for approaching poetry with, borrowing a phrase from Marianne Moore, a “perfect contempt for it” that creates spaces of possibility for the absent perfection of a poem. In this inquiry, we consider how Lerner’s description of poetry resonates with the experience of teachers and education researchers. We have, each of us, been disappointed by our pedagogy: by lessons gone awry, teaching contexts that yoke us to neoliberal methods, encounters with students that make us feel like failures. Inspired by Lerner, we wondered how we might theoretically reframe this disappointment by channeling it into a perfect contempt for teaching. To do so, we turn to the literature on so-called negative affects (e.g., the work of Sara Ahmed) and an assortment of texts—from teaching journals and email correspondence to poetry and plays—to qualitatively explore two questions: What does it mean to perfect a contempt for teaching? and How might a perfect contempt for teaching function as an affective resource for teachers suffering the sting of disappointment? In inquiring into these we hope, following Lerner, to generate places of possibility in teaching and education research.
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2023
No term defined the last U.S. presidency, and public discourse accompanying it, more so than “the... more No term defined the last U.S. presidency, and public discourse accompanying it, more so than “the Wall” and, with it, the U.S.-Mexico border more broadly. That discourse, however, has mostly been characterized by an a-historic, unproblematized, and under-theorized notion of “border.” Our experiences as curriculum scholars and teacher educators have illustrated that a similar stance about the border has taken place in public education. We begin from the assumption that the border is very real, but it is socially constructed and maintained, and impacts different groups differently. Borders are thus not only geographic markers but political, cultural, economic, and psychological disruptors of places and those living in them. In order to better understand these complex dimensions, we engage in an extended analysis of two cases, the U.S.-Mexico border and the internal displacement of the Rohingya of Myanmar, building upon prior theorizing by considering both the discursive and affective dimensions of each and implications for curriculum and pedagogy. The paper concludes with suggestions for applying these considerations in practice and questions for future inquiry.
This paper explores a suite of close writing practices and exercises that ask students to attend ... more This paper explores a suite of close writing practices and exercises that ask students to attend closely to language at the level of morpheme, word, line, sentence, or stanza. Close writing aims to move students beyond a conception of reading as mere transaction and technology, while pushing writing pedagogy beyond the development of expository prose, as is common in post-secondary contexts. Instead, the pedagogies presented in this inquiry frame writing as an analytic practice which aids both students’ capacities as writers and, importantly, their development as critical readers. Such pedagogies, we believe, reflect a less-didactic approach to teaching reading, writing, and literature. We argue that close writing positions students in an exploratory, experimental stance in relation to composition, one that allows for the analytic aims of close reading in addition to different kinds of learning.
This paper reimagines a quintessential literary practice: close reading. The autoethnographic inq... more This paper reimagines a quintessential literary practice: close reading. The autoethnographic inquiry examines the relationship between a single text and my experience with it as teacher, student, reader and writer: Jennifer Egan's short story "Black Box". In doing so I make a case for the literary as a useful mode for being and teaching in classrooms, and for the literariness of the lives caught up in those classrooms. I examine various properties of the text, including the story's unusual form, the implications of its content and genre, the narrative voice, and the central metaphor of a black box. Reading through these, I consider how the story came to shape my imagination and practice as an English teacher. A final section considers the limitations of such a formalist approach to close reading, exploring how a novel framing of close reading as relational work makes ethical readings (Gallop, 2000) possible. The paper concludes with an analysis of the implications of that approach to reading and advances resonance as a concept of value for English teachers and researchers interested in thinking about the relationship among teachers, students, and texts.
Art Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 2021
We build this work from the memory of the time we stumbled into tulips at city hall. As guard sir... more We build this work from the memory of the time we stumbled into tulips at city hall. As guard sirens fled off into the night, we wondered, “Maybe we can borrow some.” We ripped handfuls from the ground and ran. “Don’t worry,” we said, “they are too busy to catch us stealing tulips.” Likewise, we get away with this useless project because others are busy doing useful work: exigent, coherent, important work. We support much of that busyness, and at the same time wonder what is lost with all that attention towards usefulness. What we offer here, through a hybrid of reflective, poetic, essayistic and scholarly forms, may be an attempted escape from the obligations of scholarship. It may be indulgent. It may tell the reader nothing, or only what the reader already knows. Yet it is oriented towards an enduring promise. This is the promise of a literary experience, understood as a kind of resonance, ineffable primarily, but nevertheless one that matters. Such a promise is found in the power and possibility of story, through poetic lines that must be broken and conceptual tethers left incommensurable. We enter this space of breaking and unfurling through an inquiry into use.The question of use and uselessness is one way of holding human contradictions in both hands. By this we mean that we make and leave space for literary and philosophical inquiries considered useless—in that they do not resolve anything—but nevertheless matterful. We suggest that readers meander these curated pages as they would meander through an art exhibition or a museum. Within a literary exhibition one can wander through pages, spaces, and ideas. Pause. Dwell. Think. We curate a literary home beyond the demands of making something of use and we invite the reader to sit with us. As with an exhibition, possibility cannot be controlled for and so we exist in potentiality acknowledging both its positive and negative potential. Through our use, misuse, and abuse of literature and philosophy, we make ourselves a home in a possibility that can only be offered, not demanded. We manifest this literary home through fragments of philosophy evoked through a series of microfictions. As scholars, learners, teachers, and writers we are often asked to defend what our writing does. And it is implicitly suggested that knowledge creation is the result. What is the use of a work that cannot promise new knowledge? Literary knowledge may only be one gorgeous possible ordering. It is a practice which produces a kind of knowledge which is no knowledge, which is useless. If we must answer what it is that our writing does we suppose that—if anything—it offers up fictions for philosophizing. We explore a home for this work in scholarly contexts which too often find it useless, which is to say we position uselessness as a concept of value for our work as scholars, writers, and teachers. In the end we name no new uses but fiction; we steal tulips.
We have become well-familiar with how unpoetic teaching can be. The prevalence, furthered by much... more We have become well-familiar with how unpoetic teaching can be. The prevalence, furthered by much recent reform, of a systematic school culture focused on accountability, standardisation, and learnification often renders teaching dehumanised work. This paper theorises a poetics of teaching. We begin considering poetics, focusing on figurative language as a concept at the core of the art. Figurative language offers a model for figurative education, in which teachers treat their practice as metaphors treat language, a move that opens education towards complexity and ambiguity. Further, we consider what makes poetry matter to people: resonance, or the relational aspects of writing. We explore resonance in conversation with philosophies of relationality, theorising how poetic teaching necessitates an engagement with the relational. We find what may be required to teach poetically is risk-taking, risks all the more beautiful for the ways they engage teachers and students as complex persons doing meaningful work.
International Review of Qualitative Research, 2020
This paper travels backwards, imagining impossibly a particular time and place in the past, to co... more This paper travels backwards, imagining impossibly a particular time and place in the past, to consider how the Texas-Mexico border helps make sense of our own becomings as teachers, scholars, and persons. Drawing on St. Pierre's notion of the past as a site of theory, we ruminate on the Rio Grande Valley as "the literal ground of our consciousness". To do this qualitative work, we turn to others who have made sense of the border fictionally, as non-scholarly forms present different possibilities for research. We explore, nostalgically, the persons we might become in a Valley long past-an openness now restricted-and ways of (re)imagining becoming, of refusing narratives that foreclose hope-work crucially exigent for the precarious lives of those on the border today and the stories we tell about them.
We render in this theoretical inquiry, informed by empirical data, understandings of how preservi... more We render in this theoretical inquiry, informed by empirical data, understandings of how preservice teachers’ literacy lives come into curricular considerations of future teaching and learning in the secondary English classroom. In doing this work, we wondered about the past, present, and future lives of teachers: how might we understand the teaching of English as profoundly nostalgic work? Building upon the notion of “nostalgia for the future”, and drawing across curriculum theory, literacy research, teaching and teacher education research, and the music of Frank Ocean, we attend to dangerous nostalgia in the current political moment, while also finding nostalgia for the future useful for ways in which through this considering we may envision and enact more just futures. We assert this nostalgia for the future, one necessarily prospective and not solely retrospective, as informed by written reflections authored by preservice teachers and teacher educators, and reflections of teaching activities in undergraduate and internship-year teacher-preparation courses. Ultimately we argue the concept affords a frame for making sense of the past while also orienting preservice teachers forward, building on that past critically for the work of imagining and constructing more just worlds for their future students.
In this Provocateur Piece, we build a theory of poetic resonance through the interspersing of the... more In this Provocateur Piece, we build a theory of poetic resonance through the interspersing of theory, philosophy, and literature with students’ voices and our own. The ideas sprang from an undergraduate English methods course we co-taught focused on micro-teaching. Throughout the essay we explore momentary encounters of resonance within and beyond pedagogical moves and students’ experiences, engaging the particularities that shape lives in classrooms.
This analytic essay builds on recent work examining the ways religiosity in U.S. education is man... more This analytic essay builds on recent work examining the ways religiosity in U.S. education is manifest in the particular discourses that come to shape popular understandings of the possible in and through schooling. The authors analyze the function of four concepts, in light of recent constructions of religions and their relative positioning as 'true' or 'false,' in order to make a larger point about the ways in which religious understandings of difficult knowledge (Pitt & Britzman, 2003), falsehood, truth, and risk underline that which is im/possible in the U.S. educational project. Building from an "exorbitant moment" (Gallop, 2002) in a Catholic school, and putting it in conversation with recent discourses about ISIS/ISIL, Christianity, and the possibility of a true (and thus, false) religion, the work argues that ultimately schooling, averse to the risk of falsehood, continues to posit a single road to what is true and who has access to truth. This orientation, the authors suggest, is especially manifest in the ongoing moment of educational reform.
This paper aims to draw from work in the field of English that questions the “limits of critique”... more This paper aims to draw from work in the field of English that questions the “limits of critique” (Felski, 2015) in order to consider the limits of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction. The study focuses on the relational and affective demands that resistant reading places on readers and texts. Drawing from post-critical (Felski, 2015) and surface (Best and Marcus, 2009) reading practices in the field of English, the authors perform analyses of two recent articles that illustrate critical literacy approaches to literature instruction, drawing attention to the ways the resistant reading practices outlined in each article reflect Felski’s description of critique. The authors’ readings of two frameworks of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction produce two key findings: first, in emphasizing resistant readings, critical literacy asks readers to take up a detective-like orientation to literature, treating texts as suspects; second, resistant reading practices promote a specific set of affective orientations toward a text, asking readers to cultivate skepticism and vigilance. While the authors do not dismiss the importance of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction, the study makes room for other relational and affective orientations to literature, especially those that might encourage readers to listen to – and be surprised by – a text. By describing critical literacy through the lens of Felski’s work on critique, the authors aim to open up new possibilities for surprising encounters with literature.
In this study of microteaching in a secondary English methods course, we intentionally stray from... more In this study of microteaching in a secondary English methods course, we intentionally stray from normative assessment practice, instead asking pre-service teachers to provide feedback on their peers’ microteaching using assessment practices designed to orient them figuratively. The term ‘figurative’ refers to ‘figurative language’: the bringing together of multiple, seemingly unrelated things, through associative configurations, and placing them side-by-side in order to reorient thought towards new or unexpected meanings. This study reframes assessment, not as a means of collecting data on what students have learned from a given lesson in order to evaluate and augment learning, but instead figuratively, as providing opportunities to expand and imagine ways of meaning-making through and with assessment. We examine in detail four modes of figurative assessment practices through which we sought to surprise and disorient students, producing new and different kinds of responses to microteaching that went beyond normative feedback practices.
In this essay, I make the case for teaching as a sincere act. By that, I do not mean the conventi... more In this essay, I make the case for teaching as a sincere act. By that, I do not mean the conventional notion of operating without “pretense, deceit, or hypocrisy” (OED), but instead a more radical uptake drawn from literature—fiction (e.g., Egan, 2010; Eggers, 2001; Wallace, 2001)—and literary theory (Kelly, 2016) that understands the concept as “always contaminated internally by the threat of manipulating the other…this sincerity depends not on purity but on trust and faith” (Kelly, 2016, p. 201). Such a sincerity offers educators ways of teaching hopefully, bringing forth themselves in conversation with students. It offers a way of rethinking teaching as primarily and problematically a manipulative and impositional act, a mode of imagining pedagogy beyond the dichotomy between oppressive transmission pedagogies and liberatory critical ones. I suggest that if we’re going to humanize (Paris & Winn, 2013) our work as educators and scholars of education, a renewed theorizing that affirms the role of the teacher as relationally important, as having something to offer through the communication of their selves, can enrich the work of teaching—as an extension of teachers’ lives, as creative and communal, compelling, complex, and deeply personal work—in ways that prove fruitful for both teachers and students.
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2019
In an era in which scholars have decried the ways schooling has become increasingly tied to the m... more In an era in which scholars have decried the ways schooling has become increasingly tied to the measurement of “objective” knowledge through reductive assessments, teaching and learning have become less humane. This essay theorizes that friendship might provide a way out of this dehumanizing trajectory for teaching and learning, opening up new, more humane relational possibilities between teachers and students. Using my own narratives to explore the (im)possibilities of thinking friendship in teaching, I draw on theorizing from various Continental thinkers (Derrida, Rancière, & Foucault) in order to make the case that aspects of friendship that are worthwhile—honesty, compassion, humanity—may never breach the surface of daily student-teacher relation without occasions of vulnerability. Such risks are all the more beautiful for the humanizing possibilities they offer in these increasingly dehumanizing times.
We seek, in this analytical essay, to complicate the conversation around knowledge production in ... more We seek, in this analytical essay, to complicate the conversation around knowledge production in the academy by proposing “intellectual humility” as a mode for moving toward new avenues of knowledge-making, particularly as an epistemic stance against the kinds of “intellectual arrogance” (Lynch, 2017) that have made certain avenues of knowledge, especially in the social sciences, sparsely traveled in the last half century. Drawing on the conceptual frames of difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998; Garrett, 2017; Pitt & Britzman, 2003) and weak theology (Caputo, 2006), we turn to our own stories of faith and inquiry as ways in to thinking humility, through which we draw broader conclusions about what humility may offer that’s especially useful in this particular post-truth moment. We might unsettle the dangerous story that theology has no use for educational research, other than as a caution against the backwardness of faith in a patriotic god. If we’re to consider the possibility of evidentiary epistemologies as valuable in the work of combating ignorance and asserting certain values in and around education, then we’d do well to further diversify our sense of the possible in public education to include the difficult knowledge of theology as a rich framework for pursuing new ends.
In this article, the authors explore the generative possibilities of risk-taking in the Catholic ... more In this article, the authors explore the generative possibilities of risk-taking in the Catholic school English classroom. They associate pedagogical risk with what Deborah Britzman (1998) has called “difficult knowledge”—content that causes students to consider social trauma. Incorporating difficult knowledge meaningfully requires English teachers to take significant pedagogical risks, especially in the Catholic school classroom. Drawing on critical theology and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) as a difficult text, the authors employ a case study looking at how the
traumatic difficulty of the novel could be fruitfully taught at a Catholic school. How might students reckon with The Road in a way that recognizes the terrible difficulty of its subjects? How might this difficulty help them to better understand their schools, their communities, and themselves? In engaging these questions, the authors provide new possibilities for class discussion, student engagement, and assessment.
International Students’ Multilingual Literacy Practices: An Asset-based Approach to Understanding Academic Discourse Socialization, 2022
At institutions with significant populations of international and English Language Learning (ELL)... more At institutions with significant populations of international and English Language Learning (ELL) students, writing centers are one of the best, if only, campus services that help with composition and language learning. However, institutions do not often provide adequate academic support for ELL students, who are frequently, but not always, international students (Nowacki, 2012). And there is rarely a sufficient support apparatus for these students to learn language (Nowacki, 2012). Given the high-stakes pressure for ELL students to demonstrate proficiency in English (Thonus, 1993), ELL students often use writing center services disproportionately in comparison to their native English-speaking peers. Despite the fact that ELL students use writing center resources in high numbers, there has been no correspondingly expansive body of writing center literature focused on this population (Nowacki, 2012). In order to not reinvent the wheel, it can be productive for writing centers to look to other fields for guidance on ELL students. For our purposes here, we found the field of research on teacher education to be useful and generative, as scholars in that space have, for decades now, considered the ways to best attend to the needs of ELL students in teaching and learning. In that field, a body of work termed linguistically responsive pedagogy (LRP; e.g. Aguilera et al., 2020; Lucas, 2010; Lucas et al., 2008) seemed particularly promising as a frame for enriching the work of writing centers with ELL students. Across our findings in this chapter, we understand there to be substantial overlaps between the work of writing center consultants and linguistically responsive educators. Our goal is to think about what LRP scholarship might offer writing center tutors working to better serve multilingual students. Because of the overlap we find between LRP literature and writing center research, we argue that writing centers can look to work on linguistically responsive pedagogies for constructing new writing center approaches for ELL students. We begin by examining the relationship between writing centers and ELL students in order to bring attention to the overlap between LRP and writing centers. We then provide an overview of linguistically responsive pedagogy. Lastly, we offer recommendations for how writing centers can translate LRP principles into writing center theory and practice.
Christian Privilege in U.S. Education: Legacies and Current Issues, Dec 8, 2017
Chapter 6 explores two main issues: first, we look into the God of the Old Testament as a teacher... more Chapter 6 explores two main issues: first, we look into the God of the Old Testament as a teacher, that is, into the methods and means God uses as well as how those combine to teach the particular lessons and knowledge he wishes to teach his students, looking specifically at his encounters with Adam and Eve in the two stories of creation, with Abraham (particular attention is paid to Abraham’s journey from his homeland to the land God shows him and to the sacrificing of Isaac), Moses, and others. In all, we examine what godly teaching entails, and how it is enacted, and compare those to the pedagogies currently enacted in education, emphasizing the role of the Bible in helping provide a teacherly imagination as to what constitutes good (and in some cases, not-so-good) teaching. To use the example of Adam and Eve, we look into the ways in which God, much like teachers today, asks Adam questions for which he (God) already has the answers (and most of which tend to have short, “correct” answers); how he poses particular questions to Adam and engages the student (Adam) when the latter responds incorrectly, or simply refuses to respond; and how he proceeds to admonish his students (Adam, Eve, and the snake) following their failure—of conduct, of complying with established rules as to what can and cannot be eaten, and finally, of failing the “test” questions administered by God. Not surprisingly, as noted, such teacherly maneuvers are not uncommon in today’s classroom, even if their ramifications, luckily, do not impact all generations to follow with such harsh results.
The chapter also attempts to mirror the ways in which God initially teaches directly (in person), as is in the case of him speaking directly to Adam and Eve, Abraham, or Moses, yet distancing himself later on by creating proxies—in the form of judges and prophets—to do his speaking for him. In that regard, we connect God’s disillusionment with the Israelites with similar notions exhibited by teachers who are initially enthusiastic with direct teaching, and, following several years in the profession, often either take on student teachers to “assist” in their teaching and/or move on to administrative positions that remove them from direct contact with students in classrooms while still ensuring their pedagogical and curricular messages are conveyed to students by others.
We take, as point of departure for this inquiry, the event of Amanda Gorman’s reading of her poem... more We take, as point of departure for this inquiry, the event of Amanda Gorman’s reading of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the 2021 US Presidential Inauguration, which did something poems rarely do: resonate widely. Its broad uptake in classrooms and communities suggests that poems are not inert words on a page; instead, they do things. This conception of poetry as a social actor is articulated by theorist Jonathan Culler, whose Theory of the Lyric examines poetry from antiquity through today to identify different social functions of lyric poems. In this paper we take up Culler’s theory and pair it with a number of lyric texts as we wonder and worry about curriculum. What happens if we imagine that curriculum might be good for freeing students (and teachers!) from prosaic perceptions of the world? Or How might curricula, like lyric texts, create communities of care and attention? What we offer, ultimately, is as much curriculum poem as academic study.
International Review of Qualitative Research, 2023
In his hopeful defense of poetry, poet Ben Lerner confesses his contempt for the artform as a kin... more In his hopeful defense of poetry, poet Ben Lerner confesses his contempt for the artform as a kind of bulwark against the disappointment inherent in the writing and reading of poetry. Actual poems never do justice to the “transcendent impulse” that drives the poet to language, he argues, but that fact ought not provoke a rejection of Poetry. Instead, he advocates for approaching poetry with, borrowing a phrase from Marianne Moore, a “perfect contempt for it” that creates spaces of possibility for the absent perfection of a poem. In this inquiry, we consider how Lerner’s description of poetry resonates with the experience of teachers and education researchers. We have, each of us, been disappointed by our pedagogy: by lessons gone awry, teaching contexts that yoke us to neoliberal methods, encounters with students that make us feel like failures. Inspired by Lerner, we wondered how we might theoretically reframe this disappointment by channeling it into a perfect contempt for teaching. To do so, we turn to the literature on so-called negative affects (e.g., the work of Sara Ahmed) and an assortment of texts—from teaching journals and email correspondence to poetry and plays—to qualitatively explore two questions: What does it mean to perfect a contempt for teaching? and How might a perfect contempt for teaching function as an affective resource for teachers suffering the sting of disappointment? In inquiring into these we hope, following Lerner, to generate places of possibility in teaching and education research.
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2023
No term defined the last U.S. presidency, and public discourse accompanying it, more so than “the... more No term defined the last U.S. presidency, and public discourse accompanying it, more so than “the Wall” and, with it, the U.S.-Mexico border more broadly. That discourse, however, has mostly been characterized by an a-historic, unproblematized, and under-theorized notion of “border.” Our experiences as curriculum scholars and teacher educators have illustrated that a similar stance about the border has taken place in public education. We begin from the assumption that the border is very real, but it is socially constructed and maintained, and impacts different groups differently. Borders are thus not only geographic markers but political, cultural, economic, and psychological disruptors of places and those living in them. In order to better understand these complex dimensions, we engage in an extended analysis of two cases, the U.S.-Mexico border and the internal displacement of the Rohingya of Myanmar, building upon prior theorizing by considering both the discursive and affective dimensions of each and implications for curriculum and pedagogy. The paper concludes with suggestions for applying these considerations in practice and questions for future inquiry.
This paper explores a suite of close writing practices and exercises that ask students to attend ... more This paper explores a suite of close writing practices and exercises that ask students to attend closely to language at the level of morpheme, word, line, sentence, or stanza. Close writing aims to move students beyond a conception of reading as mere transaction and technology, while pushing writing pedagogy beyond the development of expository prose, as is common in post-secondary contexts. Instead, the pedagogies presented in this inquiry frame writing as an analytic practice which aids both students’ capacities as writers and, importantly, their development as critical readers. Such pedagogies, we believe, reflect a less-didactic approach to teaching reading, writing, and literature. We argue that close writing positions students in an exploratory, experimental stance in relation to composition, one that allows for the analytic aims of close reading in addition to different kinds of learning.
This paper reimagines a quintessential literary practice: close reading. The autoethnographic inq... more This paper reimagines a quintessential literary practice: close reading. The autoethnographic inquiry examines the relationship between a single text and my experience with it as teacher, student, reader and writer: Jennifer Egan's short story "Black Box". In doing so I make a case for the literary as a useful mode for being and teaching in classrooms, and for the literariness of the lives caught up in those classrooms. I examine various properties of the text, including the story's unusual form, the implications of its content and genre, the narrative voice, and the central metaphor of a black box. Reading through these, I consider how the story came to shape my imagination and practice as an English teacher. A final section considers the limitations of such a formalist approach to close reading, exploring how a novel framing of close reading as relational work makes ethical readings (Gallop, 2000) possible. The paper concludes with an analysis of the implications of that approach to reading and advances resonance as a concept of value for English teachers and researchers interested in thinking about the relationship among teachers, students, and texts.
Art Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 2021
We build this work from the memory of the time we stumbled into tulips at city hall. As guard sir... more We build this work from the memory of the time we stumbled into tulips at city hall. As guard sirens fled off into the night, we wondered, “Maybe we can borrow some.” We ripped handfuls from the ground and ran. “Don’t worry,” we said, “they are too busy to catch us stealing tulips.” Likewise, we get away with this useless project because others are busy doing useful work: exigent, coherent, important work. We support much of that busyness, and at the same time wonder what is lost with all that attention towards usefulness. What we offer here, through a hybrid of reflective, poetic, essayistic and scholarly forms, may be an attempted escape from the obligations of scholarship. It may be indulgent. It may tell the reader nothing, or only what the reader already knows. Yet it is oriented towards an enduring promise. This is the promise of a literary experience, understood as a kind of resonance, ineffable primarily, but nevertheless one that matters. Such a promise is found in the power and possibility of story, through poetic lines that must be broken and conceptual tethers left incommensurable. We enter this space of breaking and unfurling through an inquiry into use.The question of use and uselessness is one way of holding human contradictions in both hands. By this we mean that we make and leave space for literary and philosophical inquiries considered useless—in that they do not resolve anything—but nevertheless matterful. We suggest that readers meander these curated pages as they would meander through an art exhibition or a museum. Within a literary exhibition one can wander through pages, spaces, and ideas. Pause. Dwell. Think. We curate a literary home beyond the demands of making something of use and we invite the reader to sit with us. As with an exhibition, possibility cannot be controlled for and so we exist in potentiality acknowledging both its positive and negative potential. Through our use, misuse, and abuse of literature and philosophy, we make ourselves a home in a possibility that can only be offered, not demanded. We manifest this literary home through fragments of philosophy evoked through a series of microfictions. As scholars, learners, teachers, and writers we are often asked to defend what our writing does. And it is implicitly suggested that knowledge creation is the result. What is the use of a work that cannot promise new knowledge? Literary knowledge may only be one gorgeous possible ordering. It is a practice which produces a kind of knowledge which is no knowledge, which is useless. If we must answer what it is that our writing does we suppose that—if anything—it offers up fictions for philosophizing. We explore a home for this work in scholarly contexts which too often find it useless, which is to say we position uselessness as a concept of value for our work as scholars, writers, and teachers. In the end we name no new uses but fiction; we steal tulips.
We have become well-familiar with how unpoetic teaching can be. The prevalence, furthered by much... more We have become well-familiar with how unpoetic teaching can be. The prevalence, furthered by much recent reform, of a systematic school culture focused on accountability, standardisation, and learnification often renders teaching dehumanised work. This paper theorises a poetics of teaching. We begin considering poetics, focusing on figurative language as a concept at the core of the art. Figurative language offers a model for figurative education, in which teachers treat their practice as metaphors treat language, a move that opens education towards complexity and ambiguity. Further, we consider what makes poetry matter to people: resonance, or the relational aspects of writing. We explore resonance in conversation with philosophies of relationality, theorising how poetic teaching necessitates an engagement with the relational. We find what may be required to teach poetically is risk-taking, risks all the more beautiful for the ways they engage teachers and students as complex persons doing meaningful work.
International Review of Qualitative Research, 2020
This paper travels backwards, imagining impossibly a particular time and place in the past, to co... more This paper travels backwards, imagining impossibly a particular time and place in the past, to consider how the Texas-Mexico border helps make sense of our own becomings as teachers, scholars, and persons. Drawing on St. Pierre's notion of the past as a site of theory, we ruminate on the Rio Grande Valley as "the literal ground of our consciousness". To do this qualitative work, we turn to others who have made sense of the border fictionally, as non-scholarly forms present different possibilities for research. We explore, nostalgically, the persons we might become in a Valley long past-an openness now restricted-and ways of (re)imagining becoming, of refusing narratives that foreclose hope-work crucially exigent for the precarious lives of those on the border today and the stories we tell about them.
We render in this theoretical inquiry, informed by empirical data, understandings of how preservi... more We render in this theoretical inquiry, informed by empirical data, understandings of how preservice teachers’ literacy lives come into curricular considerations of future teaching and learning in the secondary English classroom. In doing this work, we wondered about the past, present, and future lives of teachers: how might we understand the teaching of English as profoundly nostalgic work? Building upon the notion of “nostalgia for the future”, and drawing across curriculum theory, literacy research, teaching and teacher education research, and the music of Frank Ocean, we attend to dangerous nostalgia in the current political moment, while also finding nostalgia for the future useful for ways in which through this considering we may envision and enact more just futures. We assert this nostalgia for the future, one necessarily prospective and not solely retrospective, as informed by written reflections authored by preservice teachers and teacher educators, and reflections of teaching activities in undergraduate and internship-year teacher-preparation courses. Ultimately we argue the concept affords a frame for making sense of the past while also orienting preservice teachers forward, building on that past critically for the work of imagining and constructing more just worlds for their future students.
In this Provocateur Piece, we build a theory of poetic resonance through the interspersing of the... more In this Provocateur Piece, we build a theory of poetic resonance through the interspersing of theory, philosophy, and literature with students’ voices and our own. The ideas sprang from an undergraduate English methods course we co-taught focused on micro-teaching. Throughout the essay we explore momentary encounters of resonance within and beyond pedagogical moves and students’ experiences, engaging the particularities that shape lives in classrooms.
This analytic essay builds on recent work examining the ways religiosity in U.S. education is man... more This analytic essay builds on recent work examining the ways religiosity in U.S. education is manifest in the particular discourses that come to shape popular understandings of the possible in and through schooling. The authors analyze the function of four concepts, in light of recent constructions of religions and their relative positioning as 'true' or 'false,' in order to make a larger point about the ways in which religious understandings of difficult knowledge (Pitt & Britzman, 2003), falsehood, truth, and risk underline that which is im/possible in the U.S. educational project. Building from an "exorbitant moment" (Gallop, 2002) in a Catholic school, and putting it in conversation with recent discourses about ISIS/ISIL, Christianity, and the possibility of a true (and thus, false) religion, the work argues that ultimately schooling, averse to the risk of falsehood, continues to posit a single road to what is true and who has access to truth. This orientation, the authors suggest, is especially manifest in the ongoing moment of educational reform.
This paper aims to draw from work in the field of English that questions the “limits of critique”... more This paper aims to draw from work in the field of English that questions the “limits of critique” (Felski, 2015) in order to consider the limits of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction. The study focuses on the relational and affective demands that resistant reading places on readers and texts. Drawing from post-critical (Felski, 2015) and surface (Best and Marcus, 2009) reading practices in the field of English, the authors perform analyses of two recent articles that illustrate critical literacy approaches to literature instruction, drawing attention to the ways the resistant reading practices outlined in each article reflect Felski’s description of critique. The authors’ readings of two frameworks of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction produce two key findings: first, in emphasizing resistant readings, critical literacy asks readers to take up a detective-like orientation to literature, treating texts as suspects; second, resistant reading practices promote a specific set of affective orientations toward a text, asking readers to cultivate skepticism and vigilance. While the authors do not dismiss the importance of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction, the study makes room for other relational and affective orientations to literature, especially those that might encourage readers to listen to – and be surprised by – a text. By describing critical literacy through the lens of Felski’s work on critique, the authors aim to open up new possibilities for surprising encounters with literature.
In this study of microteaching in a secondary English methods course, we intentionally stray from... more In this study of microteaching in a secondary English methods course, we intentionally stray from normative assessment practice, instead asking pre-service teachers to provide feedback on their peers’ microteaching using assessment practices designed to orient them figuratively. The term ‘figurative’ refers to ‘figurative language’: the bringing together of multiple, seemingly unrelated things, through associative configurations, and placing them side-by-side in order to reorient thought towards new or unexpected meanings. This study reframes assessment, not as a means of collecting data on what students have learned from a given lesson in order to evaluate and augment learning, but instead figuratively, as providing opportunities to expand and imagine ways of meaning-making through and with assessment. We examine in detail four modes of figurative assessment practices through which we sought to surprise and disorient students, producing new and different kinds of responses to microteaching that went beyond normative feedback practices.
In this essay, I make the case for teaching as a sincere act. By that, I do not mean the conventi... more In this essay, I make the case for teaching as a sincere act. By that, I do not mean the conventional notion of operating without “pretense, deceit, or hypocrisy” (OED), but instead a more radical uptake drawn from literature—fiction (e.g., Egan, 2010; Eggers, 2001; Wallace, 2001)—and literary theory (Kelly, 2016) that understands the concept as “always contaminated internally by the threat of manipulating the other…this sincerity depends not on purity but on trust and faith” (Kelly, 2016, p. 201). Such a sincerity offers educators ways of teaching hopefully, bringing forth themselves in conversation with students. It offers a way of rethinking teaching as primarily and problematically a manipulative and impositional act, a mode of imagining pedagogy beyond the dichotomy between oppressive transmission pedagogies and liberatory critical ones. I suggest that if we’re going to humanize (Paris & Winn, 2013) our work as educators and scholars of education, a renewed theorizing that affirms the role of the teacher as relationally important, as having something to offer through the communication of their selves, can enrich the work of teaching—as an extension of teachers’ lives, as creative and communal, compelling, complex, and deeply personal work—in ways that prove fruitful for both teachers and students.
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2019
In an era in which scholars have decried the ways schooling has become increasingly tied to the m... more In an era in which scholars have decried the ways schooling has become increasingly tied to the measurement of “objective” knowledge through reductive assessments, teaching and learning have become less humane. This essay theorizes that friendship might provide a way out of this dehumanizing trajectory for teaching and learning, opening up new, more humane relational possibilities between teachers and students. Using my own narratives to explore the (im)possibilities of thinking friendship in teaching, I draw on theorizing from various Continental thinkers (Derrida, Rancière, & Foucault) in order to make the case that aspects of friendship that are worthwhile—honesty, compassion, humanity—may never breach the surface of daily student-teacher relation without occasions of vulnerability. Such risks are all the more beautiful for the humanizing possibilities they offer in these increasingly dehumanizing times.
We seek, in this analytical essay, to complicate the conversation around knowledge production in ... more We seek, in this analytical essay, to complicate the conversation around knowledge production in the academy by proposing “intellectual humility” as a mode for moving toward new avenues of knowledge-making, particularly as an epistemic stance against the kinds of “intellectual arrogance” (Lynch, 2017) that have made certain avenues of knowledge, especially in the social sciences, sparsely traveled in the last half century. Drawing on the conceptual frames of difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998; Garrett, 2017; Pitt & Britzman, 2003) and weak theology (Caputo, 2006), we turn to our own stories of faith and inquiry as ways in to thinking humility, through which we draw broader conclusions about what humility may offer that’s especially useful in this particular post-truth moment. We might unsettle the dangerous story that theology has no use for educational research, other than as a caution against the backwardness of faith in a patriotic god. If we’re to consider the possibility of evidentiary epistemologies as valuable in the work of combating ignorance and asserting certain values in and around education, then we’d do well to further diversify our sense of the possible in public education to include the difficult knowledge of theology as a rich framework for pursuing new ends.
In this article, the authors explore the generative possibilities of risk-taking in the Catholic ... more In this article, the authors explore the generative possibilities of risk-taking in the Catholic school English classroom. They associate pedagogical risk with what Deborah Britzman (1998) has called “difficult knowledge”—content that causes students to consider social trauma. Incorporating difficult knowledge meaningfully requires English teachers to take significant pedagogical risks, especially in the Catholic school classroom. Drawing on critical theology and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) as a difficult text, the authors employ a case study looking at how the
traumatic difficulty of the novel could be fruitfully taught at a Catholic school. How might students reckon with The Road in a way that recognizes the terrible difficulty of its subjects? How might this difficulty help them to better understand their schools, their communities, and themselves? In engaging these questions, the authors provide new possibilities for class discussion, student engagement, and assessment.
International Students’ Multilingual Literacy Practices: An Asset-based Approach to Understanding Academic Discourse Socialization, 2022
At institutions with significant populations of international and English Language Learning (ELL)... more At institutions with significant populations of international and English Language Learning (ELL) students, writing centers are one of the best, if only, campus services that help with composition and language learning. However, institutions do not often provide adequate academic support for ELL students, who are frequently, but not always, international students (Nowacki, 2012). And there is rarely a sufficient support apparatus for these students to learn language (Nowacki, 2012). Given the high-stakes pressure for ELL students to demonstrate proficiency in English (Thonus, 1993), ELL students often use writing center services disproportionately in comparison to their native English-speaking peers. Despite the fact that ELL students use writing center resources in high numbers, there has been no correspondingly expansive body of writing center literature focused on this population (Nowacki, 2012). In order to not reinvent the wheel, it can be productive for writing centers to look to other fields for guidance on ELL students. For our purposes here, we found the field of research on teacher education to be useful and generative, as scholars in that space have, for decades now, considered the ways to best attend to the needs of ELL students in teaching and learning. In that field, a body of work termed linguistically responsive pedagogy (LRP; e.g. Aguilera et al., 2020; Lucas, 2010; Lucas et al., 2008) seemed particularly promising as a frame for enriching the work of writing centers with ELL students. Across our findings in this chapter, we understand there to be substantial overlaps between the work of writing center consultants and linguistically responsive educators. Our goal is to think about what LRP scholarship might offer writing center tutors working to better serve multilingual students. Because of the overlap we find between LRP literature and writing center research, we argue that writing centers can look to work on linguistically responsive pedagogies for constructing new writing center approaches for ELL students. We begin by examining the relationship between writing centers and ELL students in order to bring attention to the overlap between LRP and writing centers. We then provide an overview of linguistically responsive pedagogy. Lastly, we offer recommendations for how writing centers can translate LRP principles into writing center theory and practice.
Christian Privilege in U.S. Education: Legacies and Current Issues, Dec 8, 2017
Chapter 6 explores two main issues: first, we look into the God of the Old Testament as a teacher... more Chapter 6 explores two main issues: first, we look into the God of the Old Testament as a teacher, that is, into the methods and means God uses as well as how those combine to teach the particular lessons and knowledge he wishes to teach his students, looking specifically at his encounters with Adam and Eve in the two stories of creation, with Abraham (particular attention is paid to Abraham’s journey from his homeland to the land God shows him and to the sacrificing of Isaac), Moses, and others. In all, we examine what godly teaching entails, and how it is enacted, and compare those to the pedagogies currently enacted in education, emphasizing the role of the Bible in helping provide a teacherly imagination as to what constitutes good (and in some cases, not-so-good) teaching. To use the example of Adam and Eve, we look into the ways in which God, much like teachers today, asks Adam questions for which he (God) already has the answers (and most of which tend to have short, “correct” answers); how he poses particular questions to Adam and engages the student (Adam) when the latter responds incorrectly, or simply refuses to respond; and how he proceeds to admonish his students (Adam, Eve, and the snake) following their failure—of conduct, of complying with established rules as to what can and cannot be eaten, and finally, of failing the “test” questions administered by God. Not surprisingly, as noted, such teacherly maneuvers are not uncommon in today’s classroom, even if their ramifications, luckily, do not impact all generations to follow with such harsh results.
The chapter also attempts to mirror the ways in which God initially teaches directly (in person), as is in the case of him speaking directly to Adam and Eve, Abraham, or Moses, yet distancing himself later on by creating proxies—in the form of judges and prophets—to do his speaking for him. In that regard, we connect God’s disillusionment with the Israelites with similar notions exhibited by teachers who are initially enthusiastic with direct teaching, and, following several years in the profession, often either take on student teachers to “assist” in their teaching and/or move on to administrative positions that remove them from direct contact with students in classrooms while still ensuring their pedagogical and curricular messages are conveyed to students by others.
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traumatic difficulty of the novel could be fruitfully taught at a Catholic school. How might students reckon with The Road in a way that recognizes the terrible difficulty of its subjects? How might this difficulty help them to better understand their schools, their communities, and themselves? In engaging these questions, the authors provide new possibilities for class discussion, student engagement, and assessment.
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The chapter also attempts to mirror the ways in which God initially teaches directly (in person), as is in the case of him speaking directly to Adam and Eve, Abraham, or Moses, yet distancing himself later on by creating proxies—in the form of judges and prophets—to do his speaking for him. In that regard, we connect God’s disillusionment with the Israelites with similar notions exhibited by teachers who are initially enthusiastic with direct teaching, and, following several years in the profession, often either take on student teachers to “assist” in their teaching and/or move on to administrative positions that remove them from direct contact with students in classrooms while still ensuring their pedagogical and curricular messages are conveyed to students by others.
traumatic difficulty of the novel could be fruitfully taught at a Catholic school. How might students reckon with The Road in a way that recognizes the terrible difficulty of its subjects? How might this difficulty help them to better understand their schools, their communities, and themselves? In engaging these questions, the authors provide new possibilities for class discussion, student engagement, and assessment.
The chapter also attempts to mirror the ways in which God initially teaches directly (in person), as is in the case of him speaking directly to Adam and Eve, Abraham, or Moses, yet distancing himself later on by creating proxies—in the form of judges and prophets—to do his speaking for him. In that regard, we connect God’s disillusionment with the Israelites with similar notions exhibited by teachers who are initially enthusiastic with direct teaching, and, following several years in the profession, often either take on student teachers to “assist” in their teaching and/or move on to administrative positions that remove them from direct contact with students in classrooms while still ensuring their pedagogical and curricular messages are conveyed to students by others.