I wanted to bring up the issue of textbooks in the classroom because it's something that didn't come up in our class very much, but is definitely an issue that everyone will have to deal with in field experiences and your future teaching positions.
I am not sure if I was explicitly taught that using textbooks is bad, or if that was an implicit message, but I definitely had the impression when I began teaching that my job was to choose a variety of texts related to a unit theme for students to read. Sometimes this can get kind of hairy when your district, like many do, has complex procedures for approving anything students read. This can also get hairy if you don't get formal approval and a parent has a serious problem with a text.
Schmidt takes the party line on textbooks: teachers know what students need better than an anonymous textbook editor, so each teacher should choose appropriate texts for his or her students. Instruction should never center around a textbook. Schmidt [predictably] cites Dewey, Freire, and Foucault. She endorses Dewey's idea of linking educative experiences based on student interest/questions/experiences, and refers to Freire's banking metaphor (like Freire, Schmidt pushes back against "teaching as transmission"). She also calls on Foucault for lessons in uncovering the hidden power that textbooks have: using textbooks is an expectation, a norm, an implicit "right way" to teach, and part of the "business of schooling" (David Tyack's phrase). Schmidt also connects this textbook orthodoxy with current policy efforts to standardize curriculum to achieve universal literacy, higher test scores, etc. She makes the point that as students are not alike, neither should our curriculum be a "one-size-fits-all" approach just to satisfy the control and need for accountability of someone at the top. She also criticizes textbooks for often including only excerpts of works of literature, and prescribing a set order of skills, as well as promoting one authoritative, static interpretation of a text through the pre-made discussion questions and assignments.
I see a few different things going on here, and I find that even though I do what Schmidt is calling for, I don't wholeheartedly agree with her. Remember P. David Pearson's article on the reading wars? Schmidt, like most English educators at the college level, thoroughly subscribes to the philosophies that Pearson associates with whole language: authentic texts and tasks (as opposed to excerpts gathered in a textbook), teacher autonomy and professionalism, and interdisciplinary units drawing on a variety of text types. These are all embedded within philosophies of progressive pedagogy (Dewey), teaching for social justice (critical theory, i.e. Freire), sociocultural theories of knowledge (Vygotsky, Bruner), and poststructuralism (Foucault, and a focus on bringing implicit power structures to light.) Frankly, I'm almost a little bit surprised that English Journal published this because it's not exactly new information or a different point of view in our field!
I don't disagree with Smith, and my attitude is definitely similar to one of Schmidt's epigraphs (the source for the title): "The modern textbook is an invaluable servant, but an intolerable master for a competent teacher." I always sort of felt that I was "above" using a textbook, because wasn't that just for lazy teachers? That's not really fair, however. While plodding through a textbook chapter by chapter and using all of the textbook resources is completely antithetical to the core beliefs of all of English education, and I agree with Smith there, I can't say that textbooks are evil, or that teachers who use textbooks are bad teachers. That can't be true. I depart from Smith (I think) in saying that there is nothing wrong with using some texts that happen to be found in textbooks. There is an affective dimension to this worth mentioning, however, Students associate textbooks with boring stuff! If they are used to not using a textbook, they often moan and groan and assume that whatever is in the textbook will be dry, so that is something that the teacher has to think about how to overcome.
Schmidt, Renita. (2011). "Challenging Textbooks: Servants, Not Masters of Our Classrooms." English Journal. 100: 3, p. 92-96.
1 comment:
I think that if you were to blog on in this fashion you would quickly gain a following! I thoroughly enjoyed the analysis you made of the article's ideas. One thing about textbooks is the hegemony of Texas and California in the the textbook markets. Other states often choose textbooks written for these states' students (or are they written with a rear-guard test prep agenda. At the end of the day, kids don't buy textbooks, they would never buy a textbook if they didn't have to; administrators buy textbooks, and I might be cynical, but I don't trust administrators to put students' learning ahead of their pressure to have their schools "perform." You are right about the challenges of choosing appropriate texts, but I would trust the teachers' ability to perform this task before I would trust the districts who are buying these textbooks.
Post a Comment