Taking an aesthetic stance toward teaching and assessment

Abstract

It is not possible to know how learning might have proceeded for Peter if he had been in one of the other first grades in our school where there were no reflection centers, museums, easels, or drama corners. In the early months of the school year, these were clearly his favorite places for learning. He sought out sign systems other than language, and these systems supported his social interaction. Whereas he was passive and quiet when there was a language activity going on, he was engaged and talkative at the centers, where he was cutting and stapling, sorting and organizing, or playing a part. These interactions kept him from being marginalized in the class. He was able to maintain social status because he was an interactive learner in these settings. He formed friendships and demonstrated that he was a worthy work partner. Like many other children, Peter's belief system about learning in school was focused on doing what the teacher told him to do. Few teachers or adults would argue against the value of this belief. Children are expected to do what they are asked to do. But this is a very limited and partial understanding of school learning. It is like understanding efferent reading (reading to accomplish a task) but not aesthetic reading (reading to live vicariously). Once Peter stumbled onto the excitement of his own deep interest, he began to use print literacy to get answers to his own questions and to create texts of significance to himself. Then he had a more complete sense of what was possible. He realized that there was more to school and learning than the procedural layer of doing the task required. In some ways, Susan and I learned the same lesson during this experience. By making a strong commitment to our own interests and questions, we also developed a deeper sense of what was possible. We began to understand that Peter might well be making important conceptual gains even though he was passive and threatened by written language. To find out if this was the case, we had to interpret what we saw Peter do. We had to gather information from many aspects of his life in the classroom. We watched him live and learn alongside his peers. We pondered his willingness to perform and his penchant for a 3-D world. And we were patient, because it took time for the story to unfold. It was not always clear whether our interpretations were valid or how the larger pattern of Peter's development would evolve. We started using the notion of aesthetic to talk about our experience of coming to know Peter as a learner because it captured the essence of our experience. We were comparing our interpretations and continually gathering information to make Peter more predictable to us. We found ourselves generating questions like the following to guide our observations: What sign systems does he favor? What does he understand about using those sign systems? What interests and questions are compelling to him? What are his theories about literacy, school, and the world? By taking an aesthetic stance toward the assessment of Peter's learning, we realized that we could do a better job of teaching Peter. Our strategy of providing choice time each day during which students could work at things their own way was a good one for Peter. But we also did a great deal of instruction that did not connect well to Peter. We were teaching about globes and corn and history before Peter had the schema to use this information. We needed to keep in mind that he was at a different phase of development than the other students and needed more concrete support. It was not enough to mention corn. We needed to bring in the stalks of corn and husk the ears. We needed to do lessons with the children that worked at many levels. Peter needed to put his hands on the corn, to smell it, to taste it, and to dissect it, while other children were ready to graph the number of sheaves in a husk and to study corn's Native American origins. As we organized our observations and data from the classroom to write Peter's story, we found support for the assumptions about literacy that we were using to frame our curriculum. We saw turning points in Peter's literacy development that originated in sign systems other than language. For example, we saw that he worked out the concept of equivalency by constructing 3-D models of things in the real world. If a paper sculpture could stand for a real-world object, so then could a word. He also learned about story structure through drama. The physical act of running in circles helped Peter understand the nature of a cumulative story. He transferred this realization to reading and began to read predictable books that had a cumulative structure with more assurance. Peter demonstrated that literacy supports inquiry when he started to pursue his question about how Native Americans killed buffaloes. He discovered that many of the things people have learned are written down. If he could locate and reconstruct the information from a text, or if he could find someone to read the information to him, he could know important things in detail, like the length of the knives used to kill buffaloes or the Native American's tricks for getting close to the buffalo. It was another turning point when Peter learned that he could use literacy to support his personal inquiry. Finally, we saw our assumption that literacy is shaped by theories illustrated in Peter's story as well. In the beginning of the year, Peter was a victim of conflicting theories. On the one hand, he was learning that spelling was the most important aspect of literate work; on the other hand, he was encouraged to invent spelling and to write for meaning. It is little wonder that he took up the stance of least resistance - do what the teacher tells you to do, leave it to the teachers to know what is best. Fortunately, he moved beyond this dependency, and by the end of the year, he believed that he could establish his own learning challenges. He even explained in an interview at the end of the year that we should help the next group of first graders understand that they could learn to read and write by reading and writing and being artists. Looking back, we can see that we missed some potential learning opportunities with Peter. He was learning all kinds of things from playing ball, but we were not tuned in. In fact, our learning environment made little provision for knowing the children in terms of movement and physical activity. As we think about Peter and some of the other boys in the room, we realize that kinesthetic knowing might well be their most cogent mode of knowing. So we have new questions about how to set up the learning environment and where we should go to watch our children learn. When we took an aesthetic stance toward literacy, curriculum, and assessment, we made lived experience central to our thinking and thereby changed the texture and quality of our work. We liked the change. We were in control, interacting to clarify our own thinking and following our own interests and questions. We put ourselves in a position to see learning in multiple ways and to learn about learning by watching the children. We were alive and thinking in the classroom, not just doing the tasks expected of us. Like Peter, we came to understand the possibilities of school differently. We discovered that we could know our children so well that we could teach to their strengths and talk with them about their theories of learning and literacy. We think this is exactly the kind of teaching and assessment that serves all children well. Copyright © Love Publishing Company, 2007.