A Few Glimpses into the Good by Michael Anderson

The Sunday Post on Ethical ELA is a year-long series featuring weekly contributions written by English language arts educator-scholars from across the country. (Explore past posts here.) This Sunday, we welcome Michael Anderson.

Michael Anderson is a doctoral student in English Education at NCSU and a part-time HS English teacher at a charter school in Cary, NC that he loves very much.  His research interests are in the intersections of Critical Race Theory, curriculum analysis, and socio-cultural literacies.  Teaching AP English Language has been a highlight of his career in the classroom.  His favorite book to teach is The Bluest Eye and his favorite book to read is If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. 

A Few Glimpses into the Good 

This is not a post about teaching during the pandemic.  Here are three of the most amazing moments I’ve seen happen in my virtual classroom, a student teacher’s virtual classroom that I observed, and then in my blended classroom over the past few months. 

Maybe by accident, or maybe through shared experiences and students’ socio-cultural and multimodal literacies, these tiny events have happened. 

Through observing students adapt, grow, and empower themselves to be heard has been insightful; to negotiate protocols and meanings amongst themselves and their teachers is what we really want them to do.  While school policies try to force us into training students to be a sedated and receptive populace that accepts the status quo, our students are–even under duress and in this limited and terrible environment–figuring things out for themselves and should still be a driving force in the classroom. 

Here are three vignettes that I had the opportunity to witness in person, and how I found ways to celebrate learning in maybe unnoticed ways.

August – October 2020, my Zoom classroom. 

We started the school year disappointed and resigned to more less-than-perfect classes in a virtual environment.  I tried to get students to use functions like Raise Hand and Go Slower to signal interaction and problems.  That didn’t work; some of my very technologically savvy AP Language students didn’t even know or remember that those functions were there in Zoom until a week ago because it’s hard to demonstrate the controls and show them to your students.  Without my prompting, students started unmuting themselves when they wanted to talk, so I might have a queue of five unmuted students waiting there in the participants window, with no way for me to see who had virtually and figuratively raised their hands first.  I’m sure a lot of you have seen this, and I wonder if there weren’t memes and some kind of subculture of students talking about what worked best for them.  But I loved seeing them work out for themselves a system that worked, that gave them space to raise their hands without interrupting what was going on.

March 2021, a student teacher’s Google Meet classroom. 

Moving on to Spring semester, I was observing student teachers in their final semester of an MAT program.  In a discussion of Romeo and Juliet this amazing student teacher was conducting a discussion about whether the eponymous characters were misbehavers and whether the adults in their lives were right.  She used an interactive discussion continuum with generally agree on one side of the spectrum and disagree on the other.  The first few questions led to some discussion and debate.  After 3 questions (out of maybe six) students started to move their answers around, indicating agreement or disagreement to varying degrees.  An answer farther away from the vertical axis (so farther left or right) demonstrated a stronger opinion.  The teacher never said that the students could or should move their responses; this understanding–a kind of visual literary–just started to emerge.  Negotiations were made when students defended their position, and opinions were adjusted.  During our debrief I pointed this out, that again, students were defining for themselves what their answers meant, and how to best express themselves in whichever medium they had.  She had noticed it passively, but was excited to continue pushing her students to discover more and more about how they were learning on their own.

April 2021, my blended classroom (five in-person students, ten Zooming from home). 

Our governor eased restrictions on in-person learning and a variety of students came back into the building.  Some needed more SEL, some were teachers’ children, and some felt that being in person was just a better experience.  Having students in a live space and a virtual space has complicated even more things, and again I’m sure you’ve experienced the same.  My temporary classroom doesn’t have a projector or TV or anything, so students need to bring laptops to see the presentation and take part in the virtual activities.  Our biggest challenge in the physical space was hearing both sets of students.  The first week we tried different arrangements like students using headphones, the student who is talking unmuting their microphone first (as above) and then when it was their turn to talk I would mute both my microphone and computer sound and they would turn on their speakers.  All of the students agreed that we still had to adjust.  Together, we slowly worked out the protocol of unmuting and muting and now we are nearly seamless with our speaking and listening.  It’s a delicate dance and we still need patience from each other, but the shared experiences and need to hear each other is dictating how we toggle our settings.

So take time and really watch how your students are adjusting to new modalities and behaviors, and learn from them.  Like many of yours, my days have been filled with repetition and frustration.  In just seeing these three tiny examples of students doing what they do best, I was inspired.

Next school year we will hopefully go back to more in-person learning.  It is better for students, and it’s better for teachers.  But no matter what be sure to see the smallest of innovations and how your students can make the best of what they are given.  Take those learnings and push them onwards.  If they can learn in such an uncomfortable and detrimental  situation, what can they do in their real worlds?  What connections can we make between Snapchat streaks and classroom interactions? 

I’m looking for ways for students to subvert what even we, teachers, are telling them to do.  When I give them instructions how are they taking what I say and making it better?  And what lessons from their worlds are they bringing to our classroom?  I think they might have been better prepared for this than we were.