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The politics of domestication and curriculum as pasture in the United States
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Teaching and Teacher Education 22 (2006) 804–811 www.elsevier.com/locate/tate
The politics of domestication and curriculum as pasture in the United States Alberto J. Rodriguez Center for Equity and Biliteracy Education Research, Policy Studies in Language and Cross-Cultural Education, San Diego State University, San Diego, USA
Abstract In this article, I argue that the enacted curriculum in the United States of America is driven by a politics of domestication—a negative process of acculturation by which individuals are required to conform uncritically to established norms in a community of practice, and by which they are prevented from using their own craft and/or professional knowledge to assist the community to grow. As a result, the science curriculum, instead of being a site for critical engagement, becomes more like a pasture—a site for the uncritical grazing of the ‘official knowledge’. Suggestions are provided to address this pervasive issue and to explore more effective ways to develop curriculum that enables teachers to teach for diversity and understanding. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Curriculum change; Equity, Critique of educational policies; Education standards; Education reform; National educational policy; Teacher education; Science education; Teaching for diversity; Teaching for understanding
1. Introduction The teacher education curriculum in science in the United States of America has been described as being ‘a mile wide and an inch deep’ when compared with that of other countries (Schmidt, McKnight, Cogan, Jakwerth, & Houang, 1999). However, while the United States curriculum has many shortcomings (Rodriguez, 1997), it at least in principle stresses the importance of engaging students in hands on, minds on, inquiry-based science and critical thinking at all grade levels. Furthermore, in the United States, each state bases its own science curriculum on the National Science Tel.: +1 619 594 2687.
E-mail address: [email protected].
Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996). Although having national education standards is better than having none at all, in this paper I argue that the repetitious and superficial nature of the National Science Education Standards worsens when the enacted curriculum—the one that is actually taught in schools—becomes more like a pasture—that is, a site for the uncritical grazing of knowledge. When the enacted curriculum is presented as a pasture, students are required to consume and regurgitate the official knowledge via standardised tests and/or other traditional assessments without having to demonstrate any deep understanding of the subject matter or how such knowledge impacts on or is relevant to their daily lives. This process is particularly problematic in culturally diverse settings in which students are
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further marginalised by a curriculum that is mainly Eurocentric and that makes the contributions of women and individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds invisible (Rodriguez, 1997). This uncritical engagement with the ‘official knowledge’ (Beyer & Apple, 1998) is part of a politics of domestication that contradicts the essence of the National Science Education Standards and that prevents teachers from applying what they learned in their teacher certification programs about how students learn best. The politics of domestication are defined here as a negative process of acculturation by which individuals are required to conform uncritically to established norms in a community of practice, and by which they are prevented from using their own craft and/or professional knowledge to assist the community to grow. It is important to make the distinction between a normal and productive process of acculturation and the politics of domestication. In any community of practice, all new members are either explicitly or implicitly required to conform to certain core values, beliefs and ‘ways of doing things’ in whatever institution in which they are hired or in which they seek membership. This normal process of acculturation is needed to become an effective and productive member. In fact, Vygotsky (1978), Bakhtin (1981, 1986) and Wertsch (1991) would argue that, in order to gain access to and function productively in a community of practice, one must be able to engage in the relevant discourse (speech genre) associated with the specific sociocultural context(s) in which one works. Thus a welcoming process of acculturation in a community of practice would value and encourage an individual’s agency as a resource. However, in this paper, I wish to problematise the notion of acculturation when this process is embedded in a spiral of contradictions that prevents (or even punishes) new members who seek to act on their agency, their professional knowledge and their commitment towards social justice. In a previous paper (Rodriguez, 2005), I explained how the politics of domestication within departments and colleges of education work against new faculty members’ efforts to advance social justice goals and against the very goals of the colleges of education in which they were hired. In this paper, the discussion is focused on how teachers and teacher educators’ work is marginalised by the politics of domestication. By using the notion of curriculum (see also Gordon, Umar, Brunetti, & Grace, this volume) as
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pasture as a point of departure, I provide examples of how current national education policies, the standardised curriculum and obsessive school performance accountability are the dominant discursive practices that have thrown the educational system in the United States into a spiral of contradictions. Suggestions for how to counter the politics of domestication are also provided. In particular, teachers and teacher educators are urged to enlist the support of school children’s parents who may very well be unaware of how their children are being denied access to a well-rounded education under the guise of school accountability. 2. How the politics of domestication are fuelled by a spiral of contradictions Pinar (2004) and Beyer and Apple (1998) argue that the curriculum in the United States is a site for struggle and representation—a site for ‘complicated conversations’ (Pinar, 2004, p. 186). In addition, I suggest that the enacted curriculum—the one that is actually taught—is a site for domestication—a pasture. Furthermore, this process is fuelled by an interrelated series of contradictions that serve to widen the achievement and participation gap of women, the economically disadvantaged (see also Coombes & Danaher; Umar & Brunetti, this volume) and students from diverse ethnic backgrounds (Rodriguez, 2004). The nature of these contradictions and their domesticating impact on the education of children in the United States are discussed next. 2.1. The no child left behind act: accountability versus funding The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (2001) is the current United States legislation on education, and it is driven by a relentless focus on teacher and student accountability (United States Department of Education, 2001). While the spirit of the act—like that of many of other educational acts in the United States—is to improve the opportunities for success for all students, this act also falls short in providing the adequate financial and teacher professional development support required to accomplish its stated goals. One aspect of the NCLB Act, however, that distinguishes it from other acts is its punitive and contradictory nature. In other words, this new legislation requires that all students in the country
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must be performing at the proficient or above levels on statewide, standardised assessments by the year 2013–2014. Schools that fail to demonstrate ‘adequate yearly progress’ and that do not move towards closing the student achievement gap amongst students from diverse ethnic backgrounds will be placed in the ‘identified for improvement’ category (United States Department of Education, 2001, Section 1116.b). If these schools continue to perform poorly for 5 years, they will be reorganised and put under a new improvement plan (i.e., new principals and new teaching staff). While many aspects of the NCLB Act are indeed much needed in order to improve the opportunities to learn for many disadvantaged students, the reality is that the goals of this act cannot be accomplished without appropriate funding and without assessment instruments that more effectively measure students’ knowledge growth. This claim has already been made by many other scholars and in a variety of venues. For example, Linn, Baker, and Betebenner (2002) analysed the trends in the percentage of students who met state standards tests in five different states from 1998 to 2001. They found that there was a great deal of variability in student performance in Year 8 reading and mathematics tests, as well as different kinds of interpretations of what some states may perceive as ‘passing’ state assessments and being ‘proficient’. In addition, Linn and his associates conducted straight-line projections to estimate what it would take by some states to meet the NCLB’s requirement of having all students achieving at the proficiency level on state assessments by 2012. They concluded that the states that already have high test scores may need to maintain a 1% per year increase in student achievement, whereas the states with the lowest achieving scores will have to maintain more than a 5% increase in student achievement every year for 12 years. This monumental task would require a systematic coordination of great financial and personnel resources that the NCLB Act does not provide. In order to get a more realistic look at what it would cost to support the goals of the NCLB Act, Reschovsky and Imazeki (2003) developed an educational cost function using funding data from elementary and secondary school districts in Texas. They estimated a cost index that could be more appropriately used to support the variety of demands that different school districts may face owing to their unique circumstances (e.g., a culturally diverse
student population, inner city schools, a large population of English Language Learners [ELLs] [see also Brunetti, this volume] and so on). Reschovsky and Imazeki (2003) also concluded that ‘‘present evidence suggest[s] that measuring student performance, setting performance standards, and threatening to sanction schools that fail to meet those standards are unlikely to close the achievement gaps unless accompanied by a restructuring of the financing of public education’’ (p. 264). This lack of appropriate financial and personnel support to advance the goals of the NCLB act—at the same time that strident penalties are imposed on schools with low student performance on standardised tests—is at the core of the contradictions that end up transforming the United States enacted curriculum into a site for pasture. Let us also briefly take into account these other important contradictory and domesticating factors that prevent teachers from teaching for diversity and understanding and students from becoming critical consumers and producers of knowledge.
According to the United States Census Bureau (2000), it is estimated that 45 million people speak a language other than English at home. In fact, ELLs comprised the fastest growing segment of the United States student population. From the beginning of the 1991 school year through the end of 2002, the number of ELLs ‘‘in public schools (K-12) increased 95%, while the total enrolment increased 12%’’ (Genesee, Lindholm-Leary, Saunders, & Christian, 2005, p. 364). The United States Census Bureau (2000) also indicates that three-quarters of ELLs speak Spanish as their first language, and the number of Spanish-speaking students in the United States increased 67% from 1990 to 2000. Yet the NCLB Act does make any substantial accommodations to provide teachers and school administrators with the financial and teacher professional development support that they need to meet effectively the challenges associated with working with children whose faces, cultures and primary languages—for the most part—do not mirror those of the professionals who have been hired to educate them. Furthermore, bilingual education is often threatened by cutbacks, teacher shortages and English-only supporters (Secada et al., 1998). The spiral of contradictions continues when one considers that the NCLB legislation specifically
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requires that all ELLs be tested using the same standardised English tests on mathematics and literacy available to native English speakers. While the NCLB does make the provision that ELLs be exempted from taking these tests for up to 3 years, school officials are required to assess the ELLs’ language proficiency every year (Genesee et al., 2005). This again assumes that schools have the resources and personnel in place to support ELLs’ academic and language growth. It is no wonder then that the gap in student achievement between Anglo students and students from diverse cultural, socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds remains wide (for a comprehensive discussion on trends in student achievement and the various factors that influence these trends in the United States, see Council of Chief State School Officers, 2005; Rodriguez, 2004).
What are the implications of a national education policy focused on punitive accountability for the prescribed curriculum? This is discussed next. 2.2. Accountability through standardised assessment versus diluted standardised curriculum The majority of states in the United States have increased the number of required science and mathematics courses that high school students are required to complete before graduation. Forty-two states now require students to complete at least 2 or more years of science and mathematics courses. However, in the 1980s only nine states had this requirement (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2005). This is interesting to note here because, while high schools are making this positive move towards higher academic expectations for all students, elementary schools, on the other hand, appear to be teaching less and less science and social studies. This puts elementary students in a double jeopardy conundrum, and this situation best exemplifies what I mean by curriculum as pasture. In other words, the prescribed K-12 science curriculum in the United States is vast, redundant and shallow, but what makes matters worse is when the enacted curriculum turns out to be a diluted version of the prescribed one. For example, in Year 5 students are required to learn about cell structure and function. They are required to learn essentially the same content in Year 7, and again in Years 10 or 11 Biology. If students are fortunate enough to have been exposed
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to this topic in elementary or middle school, the curriculum is not set up to advance what students learned in previous grades. For another example, in California—the largest state in the USA and one of the largest economies in the world—the prescribed curriculum dictates that all students must take science at all grade levels. However, owing to the politics of domestication embedded in the punitive components of the NCLB Act and the constant focus on standardised testing, teachers are being forced not to teach science and social studies in order to ‘make more time’ to prepare students for tests on literacy and mathematics. This in turn encourages teachers to focus on drill and practice as the main pedagogical practices and not on critical thinking and application of content knowledge to everyday life, as required by the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996). Again, this is an example of curriculum as pasture—a site for the uncritical engagement with consumable bits of information whose worth is measured only by standardised tests. This practice of teaching to the test becomes even worse for elementary schools that have been put on probationary status because teachers may be forced to implement scripted literacy curriculum packages that require all teachers and their students to be on the same page everyday. Many scholars object to the value of this homogenising practice. For example, Sleeter (2005) (p. 170) states that, ‘while politicians extol U.S. freedoms, teachers in the United States are being told what to teach and sometime given a script to follow’. Two years ago in California, science began to be tested in Year 5, so this has forced school districts actually to teach the subject. In any case, students— especially ELLs—could not be expected to do well on these standardised tests when they are most probably exposed to science for the first time in Year 5, and when many school districts are requiring teachers to teach science and social studies, respectively, for only for 2 h a month (personal communication with teachers from local school districts). 3. The impact of the politics of domestication and curriculum as pasture on teacher educators committed to equity and social justice I have been a teacher educator for the last 12 years, and in my current position for the last 4
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years; during that time most of the students (98%) who take my bilingual science methods course have been Latino/a (Hispanic) (see also Brunetti, this volume). These are unique individuals who are bilingual (Spanish and English) and who are committed to improving the educational opportunities of all their future students by pursuing a bilingual teacher certification credential in our program. In various class assignments related to required course readings and/or during class discussions, my students often recount some of the negative situations that they have experienced in science or in school in general. They encountered these negative experiences because they themselves were and are second-language learners, Latina/o and/or labelled as ‘minority’ students (see also Coombes & Danaher; Gordon, Umar, Gobbo, & Brunetti, this volume). Unlike 84.2% of the elementary school teaching force of the USA— which is Anglo, female and middle class (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002)—the faces, socioeconomic status and home language of the student teachers in my classes reflect for the most part those of the children whom they will teach. After engaging them in critical reflections and discussions about their own education, I know that they are very serious about seeking to improve the educational opportunities of their own students once they secure a teaching job. Yet the contradictory nature of national education legislation, like the NCLB Act, surfaces again here and it serves to dampen the pre-service teachers’ fiery enthusiasm and commitment to serve their students well. Every year, many of the students in my bilingual science methods course state during or after class, ‘How we are going to try these science activities you’re modelling if our cooperating teacher doesn’t teach science?’ ‘That’s a fun activity we did in class today. I wish my cooperating teacher would teach science’. ‘My cooperating teacher has some computers in her classroom, but she only uses them for typing’. In informal surveys I have conducted in my classes in the last 4 years, most of the pre-service teachers in our program (80%) never get to see their own cooperating teachers teach science during either their practicum or student teaching placements at the K-4 and 6 level, and those few who see science being taught reported observing worksheet or book driven activities. (During the practicum, student teachers are required to visit a cooperating teacher’s classroom once a week for a full day and assist in instructional
activities. During student teaching, students are required to work in a cooperating teacher’s classroom for 8 weeks and gradually take up full responsibilities for teaching all subject areas). Unfortunately, my science education colleagues from another department, the Department of Teacher Education (and the largest in our College), exclaimed that most of their pre-service teachers encounter the same problem in the regular (monolingual) teacher certification program. Those student teachers who are placed with teachers at the Year 5 level during student teaching see their teachers teach science and have opportunities to teach this subject area as well because a statewide, standardised test is required at this level. However, most of these students report that the science curriculum is driven by the prescribed text and that the principal pedagogical approach is teacher-centred and transmissive. This is in direct contrast to the sociotransformative, constructivist theoretical framework informing the activities modelled in my science methods course. These activities are drawn from my current research in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms (Rodriguez, in press; Rodriguez & Kitchen, 2005; Rodriguez & Zozakiewicz, 2005). So, while my goal is to expose student teachers to a repertoire of research-based pedagogical strategies that would help them teach science following the culturally relevant and inquiry-based approach that they wish to enact in their own classrooms, the politics of domestication work against this goal by essentially mandating that science not be taught and—if taught at all—it could be done only in a way whereby the enacted curriculum resembles a pasture—a site for the uncritical consumption of knowledge. Many of us continue to put pressure on university and school district officials to allow our pre-service teachers to teach science and to provide safe spaces for them to implement the research-based pedagogical approaches we know are having an impact on student learning. However, owing to the politics of domestication arising from the current national policy of punitive accountability, teacher educators of colour like myself are further marginalised and perceived as ‘detached’ from the ‘realities’ that teachers and administrators face in today’s schools. The spiral of contradictions dominating the present state of public K-12 education in the United States takes indeed a full turn when the work of a Latino science educator committed to social justice
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(see also Gordon, Gobbo, Brunetti, & Grace, this volume) and equity (see also Coombes & Danaher; Gordon, Umar, & Grace, this volume), and who works with mainly bilingual Latina/o pre-service teachers who are committed to the same goals, is perceived as ‘irrelevant’ and ‘detached’ in one of the country’s most culturally and linguistically diverse cities. 4. Some suggestions for undomesticating the curriculum It would be ironic to close by citing what we are learning from research about how best to help teachers teach for diversity and understanding considering that national education policies are obviously not based on extant research. Part of the problem is that educational policies in the United States are set by politicians and their political agendas and not by educators. As a result, these well-intended policies ended up falling short or produce long lasting negative effects. For example, former President Bill Clinton’s Educate America Act promised to increase the high school students’ graduation rate by 90% by the year 2000, reduce the student dropout rate and eliminate the academic achievement gap between Anglo students and students from other ethnic backgrounds and that, ‘‘By the year 2000, United States students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement’’ (United States Department of Education, 1994, Section 102.5.A, Mathematics and Science). In another report, I describe how far we were from meeting those goals (Rodriguez, 2004). In any case, these well-intended goals—like many of those of the present legislation in the NCLB Act— are indeed worthy. Nevertheless, the fact that they easily become political slogans does not make them any more plausible without matching support in today’s diverse schools. One powerful way to address the spiral of contradictions described here is by continuing to draw attention to the politics of domestication and to the detrimental effects of this process on the educational opportunities of all children. In particular, we must seek ways to allow more vigorously parents and community leaders to become aware that one of the first casualties of the politics of domestication is the curriculum. If current educational policies are guided by a contradictory and punitive accountability through which teachers are expected to do more with less, it is no wonder that
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the enacted curriculum is not more than a site for drill and practice—a site for uncritical consumption of knowledge—a pasture. Another way in which scholars could take steps to raise awareness of the issues discussed here is to conduct statewide surveys to investigate exactly how often teachers are teaching science every week and for how long, what their preferred pedagogical approaches are and what they perceive as the barriers obstructing their efforts to provide a quality education to all students. We know from a current national study conducted with 6000 teachers from 1200 schools across the country that only 25% of the participating teachers felt ‘very qualified’ to teach science (Weiss, Banilower, McMahon, & Smith, 2001, p. 30). However, there is a need to find out more specifically from each state what facilitates and/or obstructs teachers’ efforts to teach all subjects—as required by the established national and state standards—in the face of the current national education act. Findings from such studies should be made more widely available to the general public instead of being published only in academic journals. Scholars should also take steps to carry out more intervention studies that seek to integrate science across other curriculum subjects and that explore alternative forms of student assessments. In our current research work, Integrating Instructional Technologies with Science Education (I2TechSciE), for example, we use instructional technologies as a ‘hook’ to engage Years 4–6 students more critically with science content and literacy (language arts). In this way, not only are laptops used as tools for typing or doing Internet searches but also we work with teachers to use available technology (laptops, digital cameras, scientific probeware, software, digital video cameras and so on) as tools for conducting authentic problem-solving activities, for reporting about them and/or for creative writing. For instance, Year-5 students learning about the water cycle are asked to use their creative and collaborative skills by working in groups to write a short story about the adventures that a drop of water may encounter as it moves from each stage of the water cycle. Students are placed in groups of three, paying attention to their academic and language skills so that they can feel supported by their peers. They are also given several scenarios from which to choose the beginning of their story or they can create their own. To keep the activity
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focused on the required science content, students are asked to underline the appropriate stage of the water cycle that they are representing. After students have written their stories, each group is provided with a laptop and asked to create a concept map (using Inspiration software and available clipart, see, http://www.inspiration.com) to create a summary of their story so that they can present it to the rest of the class. Students are also encouraged to develop their academic bilingual knowledge by writing their concept maps in Spanish after they have written one in English. This is one of many activities that we have been developing collaboratively with teachers through the I2TechSciE Project to integrate science, learning technologies and language arts. For more information, visit http://edweb.sdsu.edu/i2techscie. This website is under construction and it is being updated often. (Readers might also like to visit the Maxima Project at http://edweb.sdsu.edu/maxima. This project focused on gender and science education in culturally diverse Years 4 and 5 classrooms). In the last four decades of educational research, we have accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge about what is not working in our schools; what we need now is to conduct more innovative and intervention studies in collaboration with teachers that seek to support their efforts to teach for understanding and for diversity.
5. Conclusion To close, I believe that one more way to counter the politics of domestication in the United States is to recognise and expose this process whenever we can. The NCLB Education Act, cuts to bilingual programs, punitive accountability, further dilution of the prescribed curriculum, the deskilling of teachers, not allowing teachers to teach science and social studies, and English-only standardised tests that measure mainly cognitive recall—these are just a few of the complex issues that turn the curriculum into pasture through a politics of domestication. The detrimental effects of this process on the educational opportunities of all students are serious and long lasting. By enlisting the support of parents and community leaders—who may be unaware of how much the curriculum is being diluted in response to obsessive and punitive accountability measures— teachers and teacher educators may begin to gather
much needed support to counter the negative effects of the politics of domestication.
References Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). In C. Emerson, & M. Holquist (Eds.), Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Beyer, L. E., & Apple, M. E. (1998). The curriculum: Problems, politics and possibilities. New York: State University of New York Press. Council of Chief State School Officers. (2005). State indicators of science and mathematics education 2005. Washington, DC: Author. Genesee, F., Lindholm-Leary, K., Saunders, W., & Christian, D. (2005). English language learners in U.S. schools: An overview of research findings. Journal of Education for Students at Risk, 10(4), 363–385. Linn, R. L., Baker, E. L., & Betebenner, D. W. (2002). Accountability systems: Implications of requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Educational Researcher, 31(6), 3–16. National Center for Education Statistics. (2002). Schools and staffing survey, 1999–2000: Overview of the data for public, private, public charter, and Bureau of Indian Affairs elementary and secondary schools. Washington, DC: United States Department of Education. Retrieved from http:// nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2002313. National Research Council. (1996). National Science Education Standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory?. Mahwah, NJ and New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates and State University of New York Press. Reschovsky, A., & Imazeki, J. (2003). Let no child be left behind: Determining the cost of improving student performance. Public Finance Review, 31(30), 263–290. Rodriguez, A. J. (1997). The dangerous discourse of invisibility: A critique of the National Science Education Standards. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 34(1), 19–37. Rodriguez, A. J. (2004). Turning despondency into hope: Charting new paths to improve students’ achievement and participation in science education. Tallahassee, FL: Southeast Eisenhower Regional Consortium (SERVE). Retrieved from http:// www.serve.org. Rodriguez, A. J. (2005). Rejecting mediocrity and the politics of domestication. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 21(3), 47–59. Rodriguez, A. J. (in press). Building rovers to bridge the achievement gap: Space exploration at school and at home. In K. Tobin (Ed.), Teaching and learning science: A handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers. Rodriguez, A. J., & Kitchen, R. S. (Eds.). (2005). Preparing mathematics and science teachers for diverse classrooms: Promising strategies for transformative pedagogy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Rodriguez, A. J., & Zozakiewicz, C. (2005). Using sociotransformative constructivism (sTc) to unearth gender
ARTICLE IN PRESS A.J. Rodriguez / Teaching and Teacher Education 22 (2006) 804–811 identity discourses in upper elementary schools. Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 3(2). Retrieved from http:// www.urbanedjournal.org/index.html. Schmidt, W., McKnight, C., Cogan, L., Jakwerth, P., & Houang, R. (1999). Facing the consequences: Using TIMSS for a closer look at U.S. mathematics and science education. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. Secada, W. G., Chavez-Chavez, R., Garcia, E., Mun˜oz, C., Oakes, J., Santiago-Santiago, I., & Slavin, R. (1998). No more excuses: The final report of the Hispanic dropout project. Washington, DC: United States Department of Education. Sleeter, C. (2005). Un-standardizing curriculum: Multicultural teaching in the standards-based classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. United States Census Bureau. (2000). Retrieved from http:// www.census.gov.
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United States Department of Education. (1994). Goals 2000: Educate America Act. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/legislation/GOALS2000/TheAct/ sec102.html. United States Department of Education. (2001). The No Child Left Behind Act. Retrieved from http://ed.gov.nclb. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weiss, I. R., Banilower, E. R., McMahon, K. C., & Smith, P. S. (2001). Report of the 2000 national survey of science and mathematics education. Chapel Hill, NC: Horizon Research Inc. Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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The politics of domestication and curriculum as pasture in the United States Alberto J. Rodriguez Center for Equity and Biliteracy Education Research, Policy Studies in Language and Cross-Cultural Education, San Diego State University, San Diego, USA
Abstract In this article, I argue that the enacted curriculum in the United States of America is driven by a politics of domestication—a negative process of acculturation by which individuals are required to conform uncritically to established norms in a community of practice, and by which they are prevented from using their own craft and/or professional knowledge to assist the community to grow. As a result, the science curriculum, instead of being a site for critical engagement, becomes more like a pasture—a site for the uncritical grazing of the ‘official knowledge’. Suggestions are provided to address this pervasive issue and to explore more effective ways to develop curriculum that enables teachers to teach for diversity and understanding. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Curriculum change; Equity, Critique of educational policies; Education standards; Education reform; National educational policy; Teacher education; Science education; Teaching for diversity; Teaching for understanding
1. Introduction The teacher education curriculum in science in the United States of America has been described as being ‘a mile wide and an inch deep’ when compared with that of other countries (Schmidt, McKnight, Cogan, Jakwerth, & Houang, 1999). However, while the United States curriculum has many shortcomings (Rodriguez, 1997), it at least in principle stresses the importance of engaging students in hands on, minds on, inquiry-based science and critical thinking at all grade levels. Furthermore, in the United States, each state bases its own science curriculum on the National Science Tel.: +1 619 594 2687.
E-mail address: [email protected].
Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996). Although having national education standards is better than having none at all, in this paper I argue that the repetitious and superficial nature of the National Science Education Standards worsens when the enacted curriculum—the one that is actually taught in schools—becomes more like a pasture—that is, a site for the uncritical grazing of knowledge. When the enacted curriculum is presented as a pasture, students are required to consume and regurgitate the official knowledge via standardised tests and/or other traditional assessments without having to demonstrate any deep understanding of the subject matter or how such knowledge impacts on or is relevant to their daily lives. This process is particularly problematic in culturally diverse settings in which students are
0742-051X/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2006.04.040
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further marginalised by a curriculum that is mainly Eurocentric and that makes the contributions of women and individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds invisible (Rodriguez, 1997). This uncritical engagement with the ‘official knowledge’ (Beyer & Apple, 1998) is part of a politics of domestication that contradicts the essence of the National Science Education Standards and that prevents teachers from applying what they learned in their teacher certification programs about how students learn best. The politics of domestication are defined here as a negative process of acculturation by which individuals are required to conform uncritically to established norms in a community of practice, and by which they are prevented from using their own craft and/or professional knowledge to assist the community to grow. It is important to make the distinction between a normal and productive process of acculturation and the politics of domestication. In any community of practice, all new members are either explicitly or implicitly required to conform to certain core values, beliefs and ‘ways of doing things’ in whatever institution in which they are hired or in which they seek membership. This normal process of acculturation is needed to become an effective and productive member. In fact, Vygotsky (1978), Bakhtin (1981, 1986) and Wertsch (1991) would argue that, in order to gain access to and function productively in a community of practice, one must be able to engage in the relevant discourse (speech genre) associated with the specific sociocultural context(s) in which one works. Thus a welcoming process of acculturation in a community of practice would value and encourage an individual’s agency as a resource. However, in this paper, I wish to problematise the notion of acculturation when this process is embedded in a spiral of contradictions that prevents (or even punishes) new members who seek to act on their agency, their professional knowledge and their commitment towards social justice. In a previous paper (Rodriguez, 2005), I explained how the politics of domestication within departments and colleges of education work against new faculty members’ efforts to advance social justice goals and against the very goals of the colleges of education in which they were hired. In this paper, the discussion is focused on how teachers and teacher educators’ work is marginalised by the politics of domestication. By using the notion of curriculum (see also Gordon, Umar, Brunetti, & Grace, this volume) as
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pasture as a point of departure, I provide examples of how current national education policies, the standardised curriculum and obsessive school performance accountability are the dominant discursive practices that have thrown the educational system in the United States into a spiral of contradictions. Suggestions for how to counter the politics of domestication are also provided. In particular, teachers and teacher educators are urged to enlist the support of school children’s parents who may very well be unaware of how their children are being denied access to a well-rounded education under the guise of school accountability. 2. How the politics of domestication are fuelled by a spiral of contradictions Pinar (2004) and Beyer and Apple (1998) argue that the curriculum in the United States is a site for struggle and representation—a site for ‘complicated conversations’ (Pinar, 2004, p. 186). In addition, I suggest that the enacted curriculum—the one that is actually taught—is a site for domestication—a pasture. Furthermore, this process is fuelled by an interrelated series of contradictions that serve to widen the achievement and participation gap of women, the economically disadvantaged (see also Coombes & Danaher; Umar & Brunetti, this volume) and students from diverse ethnic backgrounds (Rodriguez, 2004). The nature of these contradictions and their domesticating impact on the education of children in the United States are discussed next. 2.1. The no child left behind act: accountability versus funding The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (2001) is the current United States legislation on education, and it is driven by a relentless focus on teacher and student accountability (United States Department of Education, 2001). While the spirit of the act—like that of many of other educational acts in the United States—is to improve the opportunities for success for all students, this act also falls short in providing the adequate financial and teacher professional development support required to accomplish its stated goals. One aspect of the NCLB Act, however, that distinguishes it from other acts is its punitive and contradictory nature. In other words, this new legislation requires that all students in the country
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must be performing at the proficient or above levels on statewide, standardised assessments by the year 2013–2014. Schools that fail to demonstrate ‘adequate yearly progress’ and that do not move towards closing the student achievement gap amongst students from diverse ethnic backgrounds will be placed in the ‘identified for improvement’ category (United States Department of Education, 2001, Section 1116.b). If these schools continue to perform poorly for 5 years, they will be reorganised and put under a new improvement plan (i.e., new principals and new teaching staff). While many aspects of the NCLB Act are indeed much needed in order to improve the opportunities to learn for many disadvantaged students, the reality is that the goals of this act cannot be accomplished without appropriate funding and without assessment instruments that more effectively measure students’ knowledge growth. This claim has already been made by many other scholars and in a variety of venues. For example, Linn, Baker, and Betebenner (2002) analysed the trends in the percentage of students who met state standards tests in five different states from 1998 to 2001. They found that there was a great deal of variability in student performance in Year 8 reading and mathematics tests, as well as different kinds of interpretations of what some states may perceive as ‘passing’ state assessments and being ‘proficient’. In addition, Linn and his associates conducted straight-line projections to estimate what it would take by some states to meet the NCLB’s requirement of having all students achieving at the proficiency level on state assessments by 2012. They concluded that the states that already have high test scores may need to maintain a 1% per year increase in student achievement, whereas the states with the lowest achieving scores will have to maintain more than a 5% increase in student achievement every year for 12 years. This monumental task would require a systematic coordination of great financial and personnel resources that the NCLB Act does not provide. In order to get a more realistic look at what it would cost to support the goals of the NCLB Act, Reschovsky and Imazeki (2003) developed an educational cost function using funding data from elementary and secondary school districts in Texas. They estimated a cost index that could be more appropriately used to support the variety of demands that different school districts may face owing to their unique circumstances (e.g., a culturally diverse
student population, inner city schools, a large population of English Language Learners [ELLs] [see also Brunetti, this volume] and so on). Reschovsky and Imazeki (2003) also concluded that ‘‘present evidence suggest[s] that measuring student performance, setting performance standards, and threatening to sanction schools that fail to meet those standards are unlikely to close the achievement gaps unless accompanied by a restructuring of the financing of public education’’ (p. 264). This lack of appropriate financial and personnel support to advance the goals of the NCLB act—at the same time that strident penalties are imposed on schools with low student performance on standardised tests—is at the core of the contradictions that end up transforming the United States enacted curriculum into a site for pasture. Let us also briefly take into account these other important contradictory and domesticating factors that prevent teachers from teaching for diversity and understanding and students from becoming critical consumers and producers of knowledge.
According to the United States Census Bureau (2000), it is estimated that 45 million people speak a language other than English at home. In fact, ELLs comprised the fastest growing segment of the United States student population. From the beginning of the 1991 school year through the end of 2002, the number of ELLs ‘‘in public schools (K-12) increased 95%, while the total enrolment increased 12%’’ (Genesee, Lindholm-Leary, Saunders, & Christian, 2005, p. 364). The United States Census Bureau (2000) also indicates that three-quarters of ELLs speak Spanish as their first language, and the number of Spanish-speaking students in the United States increased 67% from 1990 to 2000. Yet the NCLB Act does make any substantial accommodations to provide teachers and school administrators with the financial and teacher professional development support that they need to meet effectively the challenges associated with working with children whose faces, cultures and primary languages—for the most part—do not mirror those of the professionals who have been hired to educate them. Furthermore, bilingual education is often threatened by cutbacks, teacher shortages and English-only supporters (Secada et al., 1998). The spiral of contradictions continues when one considers that the NCLB legislation specifically
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requires that all ELLs be tested using the same standardised English tests on mathematics and literacy available to native English speakers. While the NCLB does make the provision that ELLs be exempted from taking these tests for up to 3 years, school officials are required to assess the ELLs’ language proficiency every year (Genesee et al., 2005). This again assumes that schools have the resources and personnel in place to support ELLs’ academic and language growth. It is no wonder then that the gap in student achievement between Anglo students and students from diverse cultural, socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds remains wide (for a comprehensive discussion on trends in student achievement and the various factors that influence these trends in the United States, see Council of Chief State School Officers, 2005; Rodriguez, 2004).
What are the implications of a national education policy focused on punitive accountability for the prescribed curriculum? This is discussed next. 2.2. Accountability through standardised assessment versus diluted standardised curriculum The majority of states in the United States have increased the number of required science and mathematics courses that high school students are required to complete before graduation. Forty-two states now require students to complete at least 2 or more years of science and mathematics courses. However, in the 1980s only nine states had this requirement (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2005). This is interesting to note here because, while high schools are making this positive move towards higher academic expectations for all students, elementary schools, on the other hand, appear to be teaching less and less science and social studies. This puts elementary students in a double jeopardy conundrum, and this situation best exemplifies what I mean by curriculum as pasture. In other words, the prescribed K-12 science curriculum in the United States is vast, redundant and shallow, but what makes matters worse is when the enacted curriculum turns out to be a diluted version of the prescribed one. For example, in Year 5 students are required to learn about cell structure and function. They are required to learn essentially the same content in Year 7, and again in Years 10 or 11 Biology. If students are fortunate enough to have been exposed
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to this topic in elementary or middle school, the curriculum is not set up to advance what students learned in previous grades. For another example, in California—the largest state in the USA and one of the largest economies in the world—the prescribed curriculum dictates that all students must take science at all grade levels. However, owing to the politics of domestication embedded in the punitive components of the NCLB Act and the constant focus on standardised testing, teachers are being forced not to teach science and social studies in order to ‘make more time’ to prepare students for tests on literacy and mathematics. This in turn encourages teachers to focus on drill and practice as the main pedagogical practices and not on critical thinking and application of content knowledge to everyday life, as required by the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996). Again, this is an example of curriculum as pasture—a site for the uncritical engagement with consumable bits of information whose worth is measured only by standardised tests. This practice of teaching to the test becomes even worse for elementary schools that have been put on probationary status because teachers may be forced to implement scripted literacy curriculum packages that require all teachers and their students to be on the same page everyday. Many scholars object to the value of this homogenising practice. For example, Sleeter (2005) (p. 170) states that, ‘while politicians extol U.S. freedoms, teachers in the United States are being told what to teach and sometime given a script to follow’. Two years ago in California, science began to be tested in Year 5, so this has forced school districts actually to teach the subject. In any case, students— especially ELLs—could not be expected to do well on these standardised tests when they are most probably exposed to science for the first time in Year 5, and when many school districts are requiring teachers to teach science and social studies, respectively, for only for 2 h a month (personal communication with teachers from local school districts). 3. The impact of the politics of domestication and curriculum as pasture on teacher educators committed to equity and social justice I have been a teacher educator for the last 12 years, and in my current position for the last 4
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years; during that time most of the students (98%) who take my bilingual science methods course have been Latino/a (Hispanic) (see also Brunetti, this volume). These are unique individuals who are bilingual (Spanish and English) and who are committed to improving the educational opportunities of all their future students by pursuing a bilingual teacher certification credential in our program. In various class assignments related to required course readings and/or during class discussions, my students often recount some of the negative situations that they have experienced in science or in school in general. They encountered these negative experiences because they themselves were and are second-language learners, Latina/o and/or labelled as ‘minority’ students (see also Coombes & Danaher; Gordon, Umar, Gobbo, & Brunetti, this volume). Unlike 84.2% of the elementary school teaching force of the USA— which is Anglo, female and middle class (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002)—the faces, socioeconomic status and home language of the student teachers in my classes reflect for the most part those of the children whom they will teach. After engaging them in critical reflections and discussions about their own education, I know that they are very serious about seeking to improve the educational opportunities of their own students once they secure a teaching job. Yet the contradictory nature of national education legislation, like the NCLB Act, surfaces again here and it serves to dampen the pre-service teachers’ fiery enthusiasm and commitment to serve their students well. Every year, many of the students in my bilingual science methods course state during or after class, ‘How we are going to try these science activities you’re modelling if our cooperating teacher doesn’t teach science?’ ‘That’s a fun activity we did in class today. I wish my cooperating teacher would teach science’. ‘My cooperating teacher has some computers in her classroom, but she only uses them for typing’. In informal surveys I have conducted in my classes in the last 4 years, most of the pre-service teachers in our program (80%) never get to see their own cooperating teachers teach science during either their practicum or student teaching placements at the K-4 and 6 level, and those few who see science being taught reported observing worksheet or book driven activities. (During the practicum, student teachers are required to visit a cooperating teacher’s classroom once a week for a full day and assist in instructional
activities. During student teaching, students are required to work in a cooperating teacher’s classroom for 8 weeks and gradually take up full responsibilities for teaching all subject areas). Unfortunately, my science education colleagues from another department, the Department of Teacher Education (and the largest in our College), exclaimed that most of their pre-service teachers encounter the same problem in the regular (monolingual) teacher certification program. Those student teachers who are placed with teachers at the Year 5 level during student teaching see their teachers teach science and have opportunities to teach this subject area as well because a statewide, standardised test is required at this level. However, most of these students report that the science curriculum is driven by the prescribed text and that the principal pedagogical approach is teacher-centred and transmissive. This is in direct contrast to the sociotransformative, constructivist theoretical framework informing the activities modelled in my science methods course. These activities are drawn from my current research in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms (Rodriguez, in press; Rodriguez & Kitchen, 2005; Rodriguez & Zozakiewicz, 2005). So, while my goal is to expose student teachers to a repertoire of research-based pedagogical strategies that would help them teach science following the culturally relevant and inquiry-based approach that they wish to enact in their own classrooms, the politics of domestication work against this goal by essentially mandating that science not be taught and—if taught at all—it could be done only in a way whereby the enacted curriculum resembles a pasture—a site for the uncritical consumption of knowledge. Many of us continue to put pressure on university and school district officials to allow our pre-service teachers to teach science and to provide safe spaces for them to implement the research-based pedagogical approaches we know are having an impact on student learning. However, owing to the politics of domestication arising from the current national policy of punitive accountability, teacher educators of colour like myself are further marginalised and perceived as ‘detached’ from the ‘realities’ that teachers and administrators face in today’s schools. The spiral of contradictions dominating the present state of public K-12 education in the United States takes indeed a full turn when the work of a Latino science educator committed to social justice
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(see also Gordon, Gobbo, Brunetti, & Grace, this volume) and equity (see also Coombes & Danaher; Gordon, Umar, & Grace, this volume), and who works with mainly bilingual Latina/o pre-service teachers who are committed to the same goals, is perceived as ‘irrelevant’ and ‘detached’ in one of the country’s most culturally and linguistically diverse cities. 4. Some suggestions for undomesticating the curriculum It would be ironic to close by citing what we are learning from research about how best to help teachers teach for diversity and understanding considering that national education policies are obviously not based on extant research. Part of the problem is that educational policies in the United States are set by politicians and their political agendas and not by educators. As a result, these well-intended policies ended up falling short or produce long lasting negative effects. For example, former President Bill Clinton’s Educate America Act promised to increase the high school students’ graduation rate by 90% by the year 2000, reduce the student dropout rate and eliminate the academic achievement gap between Anglo students and students from other ethnic backgrounds and that, ‘‘By the year 2000, United States students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement’’ (United States Department of Education, 1994, Section 102.5.A, Mathematics and Science). In another report, I describe how far we were from meeting those goals (Rodriguez, 2004). In any case, these well-intended goals—like many of those of the present legislation in the NCLB Act— are indeed worthy. Nevertheless, the fact that they easily become political slogans does not make them any more plausible without matching support in today’s diverse schools. One powerful way to address the spiral of contradictions described here is by continuing to draw attention to the politics of domestication and to the detrimental effects of this process on the educational opportunities of all children. In particular, we must seek ways to allow more vigorously parents and community leaders to become aware that one of the first casualties of the politics of domestication is the curriculum. If current educational policies are guided by a contradictory and punitive accountability through which teachers are expected to do more with less, it is no wonder that
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the enacted curriculum is not more than a site for drill and practice—a site for uncritical consumption of knowledge—a pasture. Another way in which scholars could take steps to raise awareness of the issues discussed here is to conduct statewide surveys to investigate exactly how often teachers are teaching science every week and for how long, what their preferred pedagogical approaches are and what they perceive as the barriers obstructing their efforts to provide a quality education to all students. We know from a current national study conducted with 6000 teachers from 1200 schools across the country that only 25% of the participating teachers felt ‘very qualified’ to teach science (Weiss, Banilower, McMahon, & Smith, 2001, p. 30). However, there is a need to find out more specifically from each state what facilitates and/or obstructs teachers’ efforts to teach all subjects—as required by the established national and state standards—in the face of the current national education act. Findings from such studies should be made more widely available to the general public instead of being published only in academic journals. Scholars should also take steps to carry out more intervention studies that seek to integrate science across other curriculum subjects and that explore alternative forms of student assessments. In our current research work, Integrating Instructional Technologies with Science Education (I2TechSciE), for example, we use instructional technologies as a ‘hook’ to engage Years 4–6 students more critically with science content and literacy (language arts). In this way, not only are laptops used as tools for typing or doing Internet searches but also we work with teachers to use available technology (laptops, digital cameras, scientific probeware, software, digital video cameras and so on) as tools for conducting authentic problem-solving activities, for reporting about them and/or for creative writing. For instance, Year-5 students learning about the water cycle are asked to use their creative and collaborative skills by working in groups to write a short story about the adventures that a drop of water may encounter as it moves from each stage of the water cycle. Students are placed in groups of three, paying attention to their academic and language skills so that they can feel supported by their peers. They are also given several scenarios from which to choose the beginning of their story or they can create their own. To keep the activity
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focused on the required science content, students are asked to underline the appropriate stage of the water cycle that they are representing. After students have written their stories, each group is provided with a laptop and asked to create a concept map (using Inspiration software and available clipart, see, http://www.inspiration.com) to create a summary of their story so that they can present it to the rest of the class. Students are also encouraged to develop their academic bilingual knowledge by writing their concept maps in Spanish after they have written one in English. This is one of many activities that we have been developing collaboratively with teachers through the I2TechSciE Project to integrate science, learning technologies and language arts. For more information, visit http://edweb.sdsu.edu/i2techscie. This website is under construction and it is being updated often. (Readers might also like to visit the Maxima Project at http://edweb.sdsu.edu/maxima. This project focused on gender and science education in culturally diverse Years 4 and 5 classrooms). In the last four decades of educational research, we have accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge about what is not working in our schools; what we need now is to conduct more innovative and intervention studies in collaboration with teachers that seek to support their efforts to teach for understanding and for diversity.
5. Conclusion To close, I believe that one more way to counter the politics of domestication in the United States is to recognise and expose this process whenever we can. The NCLB Education Act, cuts to bilingual programs, punitive accountability, further dilution of the prescribed curriculum, the deskilling of teachers, not allowing teachers to teach science and social studies, and English-only standardised tests that measure mainly cognitive recall—these are just a few of the complex issues that turn the curriculum into pasture through a politics of domestication. The detrimental effects of this process on the educational opportunities of all students are serious and long lasting. By enlisting the support of parents and community leaders—who may be unaware of how much the curriculum is being diluted in response to obsessive and punitive accountability measures— teachers and teacher educators may begin to gather
much needed support to counter the negative effects of the politics of domestication.
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United States Department of Education. (1994). Goals 2000: Educate America Act. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/legislation/GOALS2000/TheAct/ sec102.html. United States Department of Education. (2001). The No Child Left Behind Act. Retrieved from http://ed.gov.nclb. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weiss, I. R., Banilower, E. R., McMahon, K. C., & Smith, P. S. (2001). Report of the 2000 national survey of science and mathematics education. Chapel Hill, NC: Horizon Research Inc. Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.