Quintilian Victories

'The role of the teacher is to arrange victories for the students.' This quotation is attributed to Quintilian, but, my Latin being a little bit rusty, and a few internet searches being largely inconclusive, I need to investigate this further. (I find that another side effect of the PhD is not being able to take anything at face value. Helpful in terms of research, unhelpful in terms of life.)

But this notion of little victories has got me thinking. I am not interested in investigating things over which I have no control. The idea that students who are read to as five-year-olds do better than their peers in tests aged 16 is interesting, but doesn't help me greatly as an English teacher in a secondary school - unless, perhaps, I have a way of identifying who those children are. And even then it doesn't help me terribly much in terms of what to do with them.

What I am interested in doing is exploring the ways of stemming the decline in recreational reading amongst students in KS3 and KS4 in my own setting, where I do have some jurisdiction - certainly at curriculum level.

I have some hypotheses about the reasons for this decline. They are all to do, perhaps unsurprisingly, with things which are 'lacking' in some way:

1. The lack of access to self-selected recreational reading books in a more sustained way than through the school library. This is largely due to reading Margaret Merga, and, in particular, Merga, M.K. (2015). Access to Books in the Home and Adolescent Engagement in Recreational Book Reading: Considerations for secondary school educators. English in Education. 49(3), pp. 197-214.I think I have been particularly influenced by this given my current experience as the mother of three primary school age children with constant supply of school books and the parental reading log, and the inevitable deficit comparisons I can make with the experience of my own students at secondary level. Merga also points to the dearth of research in this area at secondary level, so there may well be a gap here waiting to be filled. 
2. The lack of teacher knowledge about contemporary YA fiction. Cremin has been particularly influential here, though the research is located in the primary sector there are plenty of resonances with my own experience in a large secondary English department with a team of practitioners (myself included) who are predominantly literature experts; adept at analysing and teaching the ‘set text’. The switch from Othello to Hamlet for A level has meant a summer of critical reading for many of us. We are also avid wider readers, the majority of the English department are members of one or more book groups. Philipa Hunt is another exponent of the community, shared aspect of reading ‘But even as a keen adult reader, I depend on friends’ recommendations for many of the books I read’ (Hunt, p86) But, this does not mean that they are really aware of YA fiction.  How does this link with teacher theoretical knowledge about the teaching of reading itself? And the notion of teacher identity? This is also related to the policy context – the ‘gap’ arising from limitations in National Literacy Strategy.
3. The lack of value placed on recreational reading in the curriculum itself, combined with the 'lip-service' paid in extra-curricular terms to interventions designed to encourage reading for pleasure - the author visits, competitions, reading passports, DEAR, and other events that go on throughout the school year. There is no authenticity in terms of building a reading community from the inside. (There is some Cremin influence here, too.) What can be done in curriculum terms to redress this?
4. The lack of good contemporary reading opportunities resulting from the narrowing of the curriculum, at KS4 in particular, which has removed some of the 'big-hitters' in terms of student engagement and motivation and replaced them with more challenging and less immediately accessible pre 1900 texts. This is linked with Cliff Hodges' idea, from Researching and Teaching Reading by Gabrielle Cliff Hodges Routledge, Abingdon 2016 that 'It is ironic that one possible reason for these students forgetting how to read novels is literature teaching itself, especially if novels are viewed as set texts instead of narratives written to be read for pleasure.’ (Cliff Hodges, 2016, p93)
5. The lack of respect for keen readers within the existing community. Again, inspired by Cliff Hodges and her reading of Paul Gee, noting that in one setting, ‘The fact that the adults use the same derogatory terminology as the students, even though they are group leaders of this scheme who might be expected to eschew such a simplistic perception, serves to reinforce Gee’s point about the power of figured worlds such as these and the importance of discourse analysis in helping us to make them visible and understand them’ (Cliff Hodges, 2016, p123)

So these are the places where I want to be able to arrange some little victories. The next question is 'how'?

My supervisors have also been setting up some victories for me: in the timeline created at my last supervision meeting we have plotted out a route which includes the literature review for the proposal being complete by January. Gulp.

Million Dollar Questions

I'm reading again. And this time, a handbook.

Specifically, The Routledge Doctoral Student's Companion edited by Pat Thomson and Melanie Walker.

It is simultaneously reassuring and terrifying.

The introduction and first chapter deal with positioning oneself as a researcher, and therefore moving from a deficit model – ‘I am not a statistician’; as well as the tensions within the process of moving between professional self and researcher-as-professional.  The personal versus the economic, for example.

So – I am dimly aware of the ‘enchantment and delight that comes with and from engaging with challenge and ideas and making then one’s own’ (29) but I’m not feeling it yet because I am confused about everything and can no longer blame the lack of access and all the other technical, practical and logistical issues that were bothering me a month ago.

I’m heartened by Chapter 2’s reduction of ‘the expectation that graduate students conduct original research that generates new knowledge’ into ‘research with more modest claims for reducing ignorance’ (37) alongside the recognition that the former is ‘formidable – especially for people just beginning their acquaintance with the old knowledge’ (28). Also that ‘focusing on particular blank spots always generates some corresponding blindspots’(35). The explanations went some way towards convincing me that my very ignorance – which feels utterly, utterly overwhelming at this stages, could actually be part of the key to enabling me to contribute something in the field.

It was also helpful to consider the form and function of the literature review as ‘providing the introduction to a lesson’, and ‘orienting other scholars to what the author thinks they ought to know and why this might be important’ (37). 

Chapter 3 forced me to consider what it is that I am actually curious about and acknowledge what might be inherently problematic in that. I am interested in 'things to do with reading', but I am interested in them with the express aim of getting better at teaching it, delivering it, facilitating it and I can’t even begin to figure out which one of those verbs I would prefer to use. I feel how I think I would feel at the million dollar question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire where I suspect I would begin to my conviction in knowing my own name. But I think that this might be problematic: that at this stage I have a purpose beyond wanting to find out a thing for its own sake.  I may need to consciously and actively position myself differently from the outset.

I’m sitting on a plane as I write this and so I am ‘suspended’ – quite literally, but also metaphorically and I need to figure out how I can regularly create this suspended space in which to think given the incredible demands of the job and, well, life.

I must, perhaps, ‘temporarily suspend entrenched epistemological and disciplinary knowledge, so that my mind and the doctoral meetings could become authentic spaces of pedagogical possibility’ (47) And wonder, simultaneously, how long it will be before I can genuinely use the word ‘epistemological’ without feeling ever so slightly fraudulent, and without having to redefine it internally at each use.

The most interesting shift is probably that I care about this stuff, finally – in a way that I very much didn’t when I was studying for my Masters and the focus was on the ‘thing’ itself and that I am finally ready to engage in ‘ongoing conversations about the nature of knowledge’(45).