The Tale of the Pupil and the IRP: Who Are Our Students and What Are We Teaching Them?

Who are Today’s ELA Students?

“You can not teach a crab to walk straight” –Aristophenes

            

    Within Aristophenes’ ancient proverb is a message which also happens to coincide with contemporary Social Constructivist views on linguistic development. This message is namely the idea that in order to effectively teach one’s student, a teacher must have a meaningful understanding of who that student is. Although trends in globalization and immigration have made diversity in the classroom an increasingly recognized reality, it is not enough to simply state that our learners are ‘diverse’. In order to truly understand our students we must try to understand how diversity manifests itself within the classroom. For example, one such manifestation is the idea that many students have not only unique ethnic or cultural heritages but also unique patterns of discourse (Constructing Meaning, 43). Within the context of an English Language Arts (ELA) classroom, a recognition of such variance can allow a teacher to understand that a student who uses speech in a slower than normal way may not be disengaged but instead be exercising a set of linguistic pragmatics unique to his or her culture. Another form of student diversity, which may be completely related or completely unrelated to ethnic and cultural diversity, is the idea that “children display different modes of learning and different ways of representing what they know” (IRP, 26). Acknowledging this form of diversity is to recognize that each learner may utilize an array of learning styles and registers of self expression –all of which are equally valid. One final classroom diversity worth recognizing is one which is marked not by a difference between classmates but instead by the difference between students and their teachers. This intergenerational diversity is defined largely by differential usage patterns in information and communication technology. For example, although today’s learners are spending increasing amounts of time engaged with Internet technology, 76 percent of teachers have never used wikis, blogs or podcasts (A Vision of K-12 Students Today). Thus, in addition to being defined by diverse patterns of discourse, learning and self expression, today’s ELA students are also deeply immersed in emerging forms of media technology.

How Do Today’s ELA Students Learn?

   Just as today’s ELA students are diverse, so too are the ways in which they learn.  However according to researchers like Cambourne, the acquisition of literacy is nonetheless dependant upon certain key conditions. Primarily, these conditions are: ‘engagement’, ‘immersion’, ‘demonstration’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘use’. With respect to the element of ‘engagement’, it is increasingly being recognized that true engagement entails having children participate in authentic language experiences which are relevant to their daily lives (Constructing Meaning, 52). As educators like Robert Probst are quick to point out, this requires students to make personal connections with the texts they read, just as it requires teachers to promote different types of classroom discourse other than traditional forms like  ‘recitation’ (Tom Sawyer, Teaching and Talking). Interestingly, the way in which Cambourne’s criteria of ‘immersion’ is understood is also changing. For example just as the efficacy of integrated immersion experiences is being increasingly recognized (like multimodal activities such as Tea Party Lessons or Literacy Centers), so too is the role that parents have in promoting literacy during the school years (Literacy and Diversity, 53). Recently, Cambournes notion of ‘responsibility’ has also been of pedagogical interest, primarily with respect to the development of students’ metacognitive abilities. For example B.C’s Integrated Resource Package (IRP) for ELA states, “students who can monitor their learning, assess their strengths and weaknesses and set goals for improvement become independent lifelong learners” (IRP, 17). Similarly, the concept of language ‘use’ is also being renovated as increasing attention is being paid to the way in which different facets of language relate to each other. While this paradigmatic shift has caused educators to pay increased attention to the links between oracy and writing, researchers are also examining how writing can be bolstered the through the skilled use of visual representation (Constructing Meaning, 36, What should I Draw Today, 8).

How the IRP Helps and Hinders Beginning Teachers

   In addressing the learning needs and requirements of students, B.C’s IRP for the teaching of ELA is a document of considerable utility to the beginning teacher. For instance in addressing the learning needs of children, the document raises a host of pedagogical concerns which may not be immediately apparent to the inexperienced teacher. Such concerns include: learning to teach within the zone of proximal development, learning to differentiate between semantic, syntactic and graphophonic cueing systems and understanding how to disseminate and support learning strategies (IRP, 18 and 21). Similarly, the Prescribed Learning Outcomes (PLO’s) contained within the IRP also contain several elements which are of great assistance to new teachers. For example, the PLO’s can serve to guide a teacher’s understanding of what developmental levels their students are moving through. Within the PLO’s for grade one, competencies like “being able to recognize high frequency words” (B12), “being able to write simple sentences” (C10) and “being able to recognize and create rhyming words” (A12) can help a teacher identify what knowledge their students may already have and what goals the students should be working towards. Additionally other competencies such as “using prereading strategies like asking questions and making predictions” (B5) and “responding to read text by making text to text, text to self or text to world connections” (B8) provide beginning teachers with suggestions of what interactive and multimodal learning might look like. 

   Nonetheless, some of the benefits that the IRP has to offer can also in themselves function as hinderances. For example, while it is useful to have an idea of what skills you can reasonably expect your students to acquire over the course of a year, it is likely that these expectations will set a standard of performance which may be slightly or largely inappropriate for many students. As all individual learners have unique strengths, it seems inevitable that for any given learner some PLO’s will be too easily attained while others may remain temporarily out of reach. Another problematic aspect of the IRP is the way in which it categorizes certain learning outcomes. For example, in drawing distinctions between personal, informational and imaginative writing (PLO’s C1, C2 and C3 for grade 1) the IRP may cause a teacher to ignore the personal implications of imaginative writing (which are poignantly displayed in Ruth Shagory’s “The Need to Write, The Need to Listen”) or the informational possibilities of personal writing (such as writing to a pen pal). Finally it is important to note how the IRP may prejudice teachers regarding the potential of their students. In claiming that students from low income families may have increased difficulty in learning to read and write (IRP, 19), the IRP risks instilling biases within a teacher which may cause them to underestimate the knowledge and potential of such students. Furthermore, we also must note how claims such as these are in contradiction to research such as Wells’ Bristol Study which demonstrated that children from low income families do not exhibit impoverished language use (text 52). Thus, just as teachers would expect their students to approach a text critically, teachers themselves may benefit most by approaching the IRP in a similar manner.

Works Cited

A Vision of K-12 Students Today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A-ZVCjfWf8   

Constructing Meaning, Bainbridge, Heydon and Malicky.

English Language Arts K-7, Integrated Resource Package, British Columbia Ministry of Education

Literacy and Diversity: Working with the Grain, Marlene Asselin. (http://ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9460794&site=ehost-live&scope=site)

The Need to Write the Need to Listen, Ruth Shagoury

Tom Sawyer, Teaching and Talking, Robert Probst.

What Should I Draw Today? Sketchbooks in Early Childhood, Christine Marme Thompson. (http://www.jstor.org/stable/3193527)