Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
A Conversation with Christina L. Dobbs
Christina Dobbs talks to us about beliefs about education, disciplinary literacies from a critical stance, and literacies that matter for learners. Christina is known for her work in the areas of language development, the argumentative writing of students, disciplinary literacy, and professional development for secondary content teachers. She is the author of several books, including Investigating Disciplinary Literacy and Disciplinary Literacy Inquiry & Instruction, in addition to numerous publications in researcher and practitioner journals. Dr. Christina Dobbs is an assistant professor and director of the English Education for Equity and Justice program at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2024, May 14). A conversation with Christina L. Dobbs (Season 4, No. 11) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/E0E0-E9A5-C5FA-D08B-6DF4-K
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Education research has a problem the work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom Caffeine is here to help. In each episode, I talk with a top education researcher or expert educator about what they have learned from their research and experiences. In this episode, christina Dobbs talks to us about beliefs about education, disciplinary literacies from a critical stance and literacies that matter for learners. Christina is known for her work in the areas of language development, the argumentative writing of students, disciplinary literacy and professional development for secondary content teachers. She is the author of several books, including Investigating Disciplinary Literacy and Disciplinary Literacy, inquiry and Instruction, in addition to numerous publications in researcher and practitioner journals.
Speaker 1:Dr Christina Dobbs is an assistant professor and director of the English Education for Equity and Justice program at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite drink and join me, your host, lindsay Persaud, for Classroom Caffeine Research to Energize your Teaching Practice. Christina, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show, hi. How's it going? So, from your own experiences in education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?
Speaker 2:Oh, I had a very hard time thinking about. There are so many moments that inform my thinking. I'll start with one that just recently happened. My niece is in the first grade. She's my youngest niece. She's six years old.
Speaker 2:She's got a strong personality and is not super great with authority, and she had gotten in trouble because her teacher had said they had to read books that were at a particular level, and so she had removed the label on one book and put it onto another and I think she was supposed to be reading, like an H maybe or an I, and she had taken the I label and put it on a D and she said, well, I made it an I.
Speaker 2:And I laughed because part of me is like I think I might support this sort of disobedient behavior because she had sort of said she wanted to read this book that she loved about kittens and had just sort of taken it upon herself to like work the system such that hopefully no one would notice and she could be reading this book that she had wanted to read.
Speaker 2:And it just sent me a lot of interesting ideas to think about her and she's just so sure of what she wants to do, and so I just was sort of thinking, like she's getting this message that like why we read at school is always to be getting better and maybe that's one reason she we read. But she has other reasons and she's sort of happy to to play those reasons out in a way that might get her into a bit of trouble. But I've been thinking about that a lot because during the pandemic a sort of research project that I had planned fell all to pieces, like everyone's did, and I ended up just doing interviews on Zoom with 80 undergrads. 80 undergrads is a lot of undergrads to talk to.
Speaker 2:And they were sort of from all different backgrounds, all different majors, colleges, different countries, all sorts of things, all different majors, colleges, different countries, all sorts of things, and I sort of spent all that time talking with them about how they made the transition from writing in high school to writing in college and what that was like, because we have tons of studies in which people are happy to sort of say that kids are bad writers, undergrads are terrible, all of these things, and as far as I could find, there was just not a lot about what they think about that. And one of my questions for them was about I had several. I asked them what their teachers told them to expect from college writing and if those things have been borne out to be true. I asked them if they think of themselves as good writers in this moment in time. You know they're undergrads, they're successfully making their way through their undergrad diplomas, it's going fine, fully half of them were like no, I'm terrible at writing, it's awful.
Speaker 2:But I ask each one of them to tell me if there was ever a moment when they felt proud of a piece of writing they had done and I didn't know what they'd say, if they would say anything. When we first sort of made that question as part of the protocol, I thought who knows what's going to happen with this one? What happened was that every single one of them whether they said they were a bad writer or a good one told me about a moment that they felt really proud of that. They remembered mostly quite vividly. Some of them were from a really long time ago and some of them were quite recent. But they all had these reasons for feeling proud, and some of it was feeling proud because I got a good grade and that had never happened to me before.
Speaker 2:But more often than not it was sort of like my niece with that book.
Speaker 2:It was like I have my own reasons for thinking that I did well on this, for thinking that it did something that mattered to me, that it was important to me, that I wrote an essay about the show Tiger King to my English professor and in his comments he wrote back that he was going to watch it, that I had convinced him to watch it and that made me proud, in which people had this sort of broad range of reasons why the literacies that they had used to communicate really mattered to them. And so I've been thinking a lot about that, about how school can sometimes really inadvertently narrow the purposes into these like very achievement oriented ideas. But then largely what I heard from the undergrads and what I saw from my niece you know, sort of hacking the system in her way was something besides. That was a more complex sort of relationship with a set of literacies and how they connect to like who we want to be in the world and what we love and enjoy and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:I love both of those stories, christina, and I love how you brought them together, as you know, being sort of learner-centered and learner-driven kinds of moments, and, as you were describing both of those scenarios, it really made me think more about kind of the arbitrary nature of what schools expect in relation to literacy and even sometimes the kind of arbitrary nature of how we do things like leveled text. Well, yes, of course it's related to text complexity and all of that, but we know every system uses a different system, right, and so by placing these stickers on things and saying you must stick to this one particular way of reading, or you know, we're going to limit your topics because you can only have books that have a sticker with the letter D on them, it does just sort of remind me of how far removed that is from what learners value and the kind of growth and achievement that they want to see in their own learning, versus what sort of the systems of schooling expect from them.
Speaker 2:I mean, I spend a ton of time thinking about disciplinary communities and what it means to be part of them and what it means to change them. I tell I guess listeners don't know this I am a woman of color, I'm multi-ethnic and Latina, and I have all kinds of experiences in my life where people are sort of like we want you, we want more diversity, come sit, do this work with us, sit at our table. And what they mean when they say that is come here, sit at our table, look how you look, but behave like we behave. And I find that really complicated to navigate because sort of learning and understanding the norms of behavior can be a little bit more elusive for a person like me. And also, you know, I don't know that I want to sort of behave like everyone else. Just to say that I did that. I'm doing this project right now for a new book which is going to be about critical disciplinary literacy. It's time to think about what a critical version of those ideas could be, even though I think they make for quite an easy neighbors to sort of think about how marginalized peoples made their way into various disciplines. So I was sitting with a physics teacher recently talking about this, who is also a person of color and who was sort of the only one in college studying physics like has been sort of isolated in lots of ways throughout his career and now as a physics teacher and he talks a lot about feeling like, well, it was the sort of public intellectuals Like he talks a lot about Neil deGrasse Tyson on social media or people like that sort of making an effort to communicate outside the disciplinary community that really made him feel like he had a chance at joining that community and also communicating in the way that he communicates and not, you know, mimicking all the old white guy physicists who sort of came before him, all the old white guy physicists who sort of came before him. And I think a lot about that because about what it means to sort of use literacy to your own ends and still join these communities that have sort of very specific norms about you know how literacy gets used.
Speaker 2:I've been writing a paper with my colleague in the English department. We co-teach a class together. It says English on his door. It says English education on my door. You would think that how we do things is essentially similar and in our partnership together we have discovered that's not the case, that like, actually there are a thousand differences and so we have been writing a little bit like ethnography style about like, why is that? What does it say about the disciplinary communities, if they are sort of quite different but purport to do the same subject? I just have all these questions about how communities use language to sort of signal who belongs and who doesn't, and a lot of students, when they were talking to me about their proud writing moments, they were sort of saying this was a moment in which I used language in a way that felt like me, like I was being myself, and I still sometimes got feedback that I belonged and that that mattered.
Speaker 1:I think the point that you're making about like working within a discipline while also sort of subtly kind of pushing on the barriers of what it is that actually defines that discipline or, as you said, the way that people communicate who work within that discipline. I think that is so very important because I often think about how much time and energy we devote to educating for the past and I don't mean about the past, I mean for past skills, past careers rather than really thinking forward to you know, what does it mean to use literacy for your own means and for your own goals, for your own ways of communicating? And how do you break into a community that has its own way of thinking and speaking when maybe you don't either know all of the conventions or perhaps are looking to intentionally work to change and shift some of those conventions or at least broaden them to include other voices? I think that's hard to do in a higher education setting. I think it's sometimes even harder to do in a K-12 setting.
Speaker 2:Well, our silos are so set. You know, if you look at what the Committee of 10 said we should be doing in like 1900 in American high schools. You know the sciences are slightly different, the languages are slightly different. 80 of 10 said we should be doing in like 1900 in American high schools. You know, the sciences are slightly different, the languages are slightly different, but for the most part it's exactly the same as it has been for, you know, 125 years.
Speaker 2:And that feels sort of intractable in some ways. You know, students are telling me like I wish I could study more computer science or more of this or more of that. And in a lot of the small Boston high schools around where I am, you know, we have just the just enough teachers to have the basics and that's all we have. And I think, you know, small schools have lots of advantages but they don't have sort of lots of flexibility to experiment with new spaces and new subjects. And so then I think, well, what does it mean to tinker within the subjects? What does it mean to ask hard questions about what it means to be critical within the subjects? And most teachers don't go through teacher training in a way that teaches them to think about it in that way. Most people don't decide.
Speaker 2:I hated calculus with a passion in high school. I think I'll spend my life teaching that to kids. People just don't think about it quite in that way, typically. Occasionally people do. I find them to be more outliers than sort of the average, but usually there was something about a discipline Like English always made sense to me. It made sense to read the books. It was okay to read the books even if they didn't seem like they were about me. That was part of what I liked about them.
Speaker 2:And so then to be within the discipline and feel constrained by it was sort of a complicated feeling to have because I was like, well, I don't, I didn't want to join the other communities necessarily, but it feels like we have to teach all of the disciplines, not just English, although I've been doing English the longest in critical ways that push our students to be critical about them, to not replicate norms that just exist because traditionally that's the way it's been like, you know, whiteness and maleness and cisgenderness and heteronormativity and all of these things are just sort of embedded because the people who have participated in these communities tend to be members of those groups.
Speaker 2:And so what does it mean to do science without all of that? What does it mean to do science in ways that are new and different, or math or art or any of those things? I think we have to do that work if we want students to have access to the possible selves that they want to have. They want lots of things from their literate lives as adults and some things are going to have to change in some cases for them to get to those places. I don't want to leave all that change for them to have to do on their own. I want us to sort of think about it together, what it could look like.
Speaker 1:And I know in my mind, and certainly in the state where I live and teach, it seems as though policies increasingly are getting in the way of making those changes.
Speaker 1:So I think that teachers are feeling very challenged to continue to do good work and I think they're even for school administrators, as well as district administrators. It's becoming increasingly difficult to make space for other ways of thinking. You know that aren't within that sort of stereotyped, as you said, white cisgender kind of ways of thinking. You know that aren't within that sort of stereotyped, as you said, white cisgender kind of ways of thinking, because it is so baked into the structures right, and particularly, I think, whenever we have folks who are in power who are trying to bake in those same ideas or trying to bring them in with even more force right, in order to erase other voices and perspectives. I think that can be really hard to do that work. I think it at times. In fact, talking with a teacher recently, she talked about how lonely that work is and how you can really feel very isolated in just trying to honor every student who is in your classroom.
Speaker 2:I do a lot of work I guess not technically literacy, but sort of with the National Council of Teachers of English. I'm on the standing committee against censorship I'm told was once a very quiet committee assignment, and is not that today? It is a busy, lot of work. But one of the things that has been really powerful about that work and my experience in it is that we have this project, that this story matters project, where we write these rationales for books that have been challenged and we just write about like why people use them, what they use them to teach, what in the standards we feel like are supported by reading the book. All of these things we make these documents. The very first one I ever made with a colleague was for the book Gender Queer, which is incredibly complex and incredibly challenged all over the place, including in Massachusetts.
Speaker 2:You, too, can yell at me in my Twitter DMs about having done that, but one interesting thing about that is like now we have met all of these teachers across the country who are facing a narrowing of how they have approached their work in the past, and I think it probably is happening in a lot of disciplines and it just so happens that this work deals primarily with English teachers, but you know we I hear stories from teachers all the time. A teacher said to me at conference we were at conference the week before Thanksgiving. Recently we were in Columbus, ohio. It was my first ever visit to Columbus, which is lovely and a teacher said I don't, I don't think you can do anything about what happened to me, which was really, really painful. Will you just listen to me tell you what happened? And she had just been sort of accused of all manner of things for reading a book that sort of dealt with racial justice with a group of students. And I really keep thinking about that. Will you just listen to me tell you what happened, what it means to just not feel so alone, in that we have an article coming out or maybe it's out now, I don't know it's coming out in English journal about what to do before, during and after a book challenge so that you won't actually feel alone if it's happening to you because the not feeling alone is actually one of the hardest things to overcome and to have sort of proactive conversations about censorship in your community and make policies that don't happen sort of after someone is already incensed about a book, but have sort of been thoughtfully put in place before that happens and all these sorts of things.
Speaker 2:And even though I find it heartbreaking to hear all of these stories, I'm glad that we sort of have this space now where people can talk to each other about it and can sort of honor one another's experience. It doesn't feel like an old lady in my hometown when things were hard she used to say it feels like moving a beach with a teaspoon and I I feel like I'm moving a beach with a teaspoon some days in thinking about doing this work. It's going to take a lot more teaspoons to do it, but it does feel like doing something. And having a community of people thinking about those issues to do something has been a really meaningful experience for me about what it means to come together. What it means for teachers to feel supported in this era in which the deprofessionalization of teachers is really common. What it might mean to come together, have discussions about the fact that all education is political and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous, and then to think about what we think school is for and what kind of values we want to transmit to kids.
Speaker 1:I think so often about that question what is school for?
Speaker 1:And in my mind, school is not for what we are currently using it for, or at least not in many instances of public education, and I mentioned, of course, particularly where I live and work.
Speaker 1:But then again, how do we actually change that? And I think this idea of moving a beach with a teaspoon is it really speaks to me. You can see this happening right, and I think that there are a lot of people who feel this work just that we don't necessarily have, whether it is, you know, the magnitude of force that we need to actually make changes, or whether it is the time and energy to do the work that needs to be done right, especially whenever we have sort of the day-to-day pressures and demands of what must happen in order just to keep things going, much less to change things. I think that that's really challenging, but it also I get this image in my mind of all of us who are like-minded, grabbing our teaspoons and pitching in, maybe on the same beach. But I also think that we have a lot of beaches to move, and that's part of the challenge too.
Speaker 2:The thing I like about the beach metaphor is like the tide is still going to come, it's coming back, it's going to set us back. That is part of, you know, the sort of process, of sort of cultural progression and then moving backward and all those things. And so, you know, maybe we could build tools that are slightly more effective than teaspoon, like. There's a lot of things about that metaphor that really worked for me, but it does often feel like there is just a lot of work to be done and I often think to myself well, if I don't have any better idea today about bigger tools or doing this differently or getting people together, any of that, at least I'm getting a teaspoon. I'm going to do one little thing and every little thing matters, and or or maybe it doesn't, but it matters to me. And then invariably that leads me to other people who are doing similar work and and there is sort of solidarity and empathy and all sorts of things in that experience that I think are good for us to sort of share with each other.
Speaker 1:Right, they, they are meaningful. I guess, like you said, even if we're moving a couple grains of sand at a time, that work is still meaningful. And I just realized I don't think I've even asked you the second question yet, Christina. What do you want listeners to know about your work? Or maybe more appropriately, what else do you want listeners to know about your work?
Speaker 2:about your work. I want people to know that when I do work I'm sort of interested in sitting with people and sort of carefully observing. Like it could be students writing, it could be teachers beliefs, it could be lots of different things, but I used to tell my professors in graduate school that I was not going to do any studies that say that students who we know have been perennially structured to be struggling in schools are struggling in schools. Like I can see the system with my eyes, it's doing what it's supposed to do. I'm not going to do work that sort of shows that and I've tried really hard to make that happen. I want people like when I do professional learning with teachers, I just want to sit with happen. I want people like when I do professional learning with teachers, I just want to sit with them. I know some stuff, they know tons of stuff. I want us to put that stuff together and see what we come up with. So a lot of my work is sort of centered on working with teachers and then seeing what kinds of changes to instructional practice that they enact. Based on what we've heard and what we learn, I want people to think about what they really believe.
Speaker 2:I spend a lot of time asking teachers what they really what they believe and how they think they came to have those beliefs. Like just one example that teachers always tell me in my classes. They always tell me that they think the English language is really exceptionally hard to learn. Multilingual kids who come to their classrooms and are learning English at school and things like that. They always tell me English is super hard. Now I'm always asking them, like what makes you say so? Where do you think that belief comes from? And then they're like I don't know. I guess I've just always. You know, in elementary school people told me English was really hard to spell, and I think that it is. I've always seen lots of stories about kids who are multilingual, you know, having an opportunity gap and all of these things, and I guess I just really think English is hard. And then we start unpacking like well, what narratives does it serve if we behave as though that's true? If English is the hardest language, then it makes sense that entire groups of students might be labeled as struggling in schools, when actually we just potentially have not done enough to be teaching them all these sorts of complicated beliefs that people have, they come from somewhere and sort of maintaining those narratives about how American schooling works serves the system in some way, or we could change those and we don't have to serve the system in some way. We could have something much more challenging. There are lots of languages that are incredibly complex to learn for lots of different reasons. There is something about sort of thinking that English is the hardest. That maintains a hierarchy that is connected to all sorts of ideas about colonialism and all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2:I spend a lot of time sitting with people and unpacking that, and then I spend a lot of time thinking about my own stuff, about that and what I need to unlearn in order to make that happen.
Speaker 2:You know I teach in Massachusetts.
Speaker 2:I have to teach every content teacher that comes through our programs in math, science, social studies and English how to support their multilingual students using a sheltered English approach which, by the way, not totally for that, not for it at all, but I have to teach that.
Speaker 2:By the way, not totally for that, not for it at all, but I have to teach that. We did a self-study of ourselves recently and discovered that, like, despite the fact that I tell myself, I have to teach this sheltered class because the state says I have to teach it and I'm doing all these things that students sometimes still take away, that, like English only is the right thing to do and that bilingual education is too hard to enact and all of these challenges. And that bilingual education is too hard to enact and all of these challenges. And so that kind of work interests me, where we look at how our beliefs mine and other people's get turned into sort of thoughts about how the world works and then how those thoughts get turned into our ideas about what instruction and assessment ought to look like. I find myself being in that space, thinking about those questions especially about language.
Speaker 1:Over and over again. You are certainly giving me a whole lot to think about and some new questions to think with, and I wanted to ask you you mentioned this idea of sheltered English and, for any listeners who might not be familiar with that, what exactly is that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so in Massachusetts, which, until 2017, had one of the most restrictive language policies for multilingual kids in the United States. English was the mandated language of instruction, so there was no transitional bilingual classrooms. You couldn't go to class and learn in Spanish while you were learning English or anything like that. All the classrooms, it was sort of immediate immersion in English in all subject areas. And you know, I'm from Texas. People are like well, texas must be more conservative. I'm like no, texas has bilingual education. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Massachusetts did not, and that meant that when the law was passed originally in the early 2000s, bilingual education in Massachusetts was mostly dismantled. So there was some dual language spaces that managed to survive, which are sort of ongoing education in two languages for kids across their years of schooling. But all the transitional programs like where, as you're learning, you keep learning math and the language that you are most familiar with from home, you learn to develop some literacy in your first language, and things like that, even for very young children all of that was dismantled and then later on, the Department of Justice came to Massachusetts and said you're violating the civil rights of kids by not training teachers to work with multilingual students, and so then this course came to be. I think I designed it and taught it for the first time. We did design it very quickly because the state was like we do not want the Department of Justice to come back. Please. We're doing all these things so that they never come back and say we're violating civil rights again. So that was 11 years ago, I think, when we first started doing that work. Well then, in 2017, the look bill was passed.
Speaker 2:Transitional bilingual education is a sort of governmentally sanctioned approach, except for we dismantled all of it. Rebuilding it doesn't just, you know, snap happen overnight, because teachers don't have up-to-date materials and languages other than English. They haven't made any in some languages that are quite common in Massachusetts now, and so one artifact of that is still, teachers have to take a class about supporting multilingual learners that is primarily grounded in structured English immersion approaches, in order to get their teaching certification at the secondary level. I don't know about all the levels exactly, but I think everyone has to do it. So we have this weird world in which, like, you could technically teach bilingual if you were in a place where they had it, and all of that, but you also have to take this class that is grounded in English only, and so we talk a lot about, like our beliefs, about you know, all sorts of things.
Speaker 2:Most students come into my class. They're mostly white teachers. Of course they're more gender balanced at the secondary level than I think they probably would be at elementary. But they almost always come in thinking that the vast majority of students who are multilingual in schools will have recently emigrated, for example, and not have lived here their whole lives. Or there are a lot of things like why might you get the impression that all these students are sort of new immigrants to the United States when most of them have lived here and their parents have lived here for a long time? Like those sorts of narratives. Where do they come from? Falling short of what my goals are and having to do it again and try to do it better the next time, to sort of think through a system that has really sort of put all its chips on on English and now is sort of trying to sort of shift in a different direction. But how to be within that I find very complicated, at least in Massachusetts.
Speaker 1:Well, it sounds very complicated to be again.
Speaker 1:It's sort of that like it sounds as though the curriculum is sort of within a more equitable framework, but it's also working within established structures that didn't honor that equity for quite some time.
Speaker 1:And so I think you also have like, as you were talking about this, christina, some time. And so I think you also have like, as you were talking about this, christina, I'm envisioning sort of this gap in teacher preparedness. You know where that was all going on in English only was the approach. So you likely have a large portion of the teacher workforce that doesn't really have any preparation or exposure to a different way of thinking about instructing, or even I think that you know even teachers who may not speak a child's home language. There are other sorts of levers that we can use right in order to communicate and to draw out understanding in a way that meets the goals of the student but is also kind of comprehensible to all parties, and I think that if you're in a state where it's an English only approach, all of that is sort of missing too, I would guess, which makes it even more complicated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean there's so many things that are missing. I mean it's a funny, you know, set of questions because I straddle a lot of world's professional learning and multilingual learners and English education and all these sorts of things but there are so many complexities about. You know, when the English only law was getting passed in Massachusetts in the early 2000s, ron Unns, who ran campaigns in lots of states to try to get English only passed, you know he ran around Massachusetts with a whole bunch of signs that said English for the children. If you've never been multilingual, if you don't know anyone or didn't go to school with anyone who's multilingual, you know you hear English for the children. These kids have a right to English as quickly as possible and you think, okay, that might make sense. And it's such a funny. You know I used to do this unit at a local school with a teacher partner friend of mine, where we would talk about the language of school and how it works and like why do people not use personal pronouns in their quote, unquote, academic writing and stuff like that, and one of the activities I used to do was to bring in a whole bunch of academic articles that were written in languages other than English and kids would be like I didn't know.
Speaker 2:People go to college in languages other than English. People do research in languages other than English. What do you mean? No-transcript in it? Like I think a lot of individual teachers are inadvertently teaching students and that the system is teaching on purpose. Is that, like, English is the language of the academy, english is the language that counts the most.
Speaker 2:All of these things that are not actually true and for some students they were like wait, I didn't even know. Like there's articles in Mandarin that are like research articles, there's articles in these different languages, and I think that's what the hegemony of English does. It sort of promotes itself in a way. That sort of prevents all of that other work and thinking from being seen. But the first time I did that it was just sort of an accident. But now I now every time I teach that lesson with students, because a lot of them don't know anybody that is like a professor who is writing research articles in a language other than English. A lot of them have never, you know, I didn't know professors until I went to college. A lot of students just don't have that experience and so you know, there's a lot sort of bound up in sort of saying to kids the language that we should be learning in is English. That's the one that's most important, that I think we have to unpack and unlearn and work through what it might really mean to do it differently.
Speaker 1:Well, and it reminds me of a question that you posed earlier you know, what do you really believe and how did you come to believe that?
Speaker 1:And I think that asking those kinds of critical questions, I mean that is one of those teaspoons we can use to move the beach, right, if we think about what is it and what is it that we think and why do we think that?
Speaker 1:Because I think you're right, so many of our beliefs are, yes, they may be informed by our experiences, but I also think that they're informed by, kind of the narratives that have surrounded us throughout our entire lives, right, whether it is what we hear from our family, or from our school, or from, maybe, the media we listen to, or the people we spend our time with. You know, they all sort of create that frame with which we see the world. And I think that, like, the questions that you're asking really make me think and I tend to think very visually quite often, but I think, you know what if we were just to move that frame, what if we were to focus on something else or to see the world from a different perspective? It really does, then, I think, change or at least make us question what we think we know about the world.
Speaker 2:And you know one thing about the beach and the teaspoon like I've been doing those interviews with minoritized folks who are in different fields, a lot of them tell me that it only took one teacher to teach them that they belonged. Like it didn't take their whole college. Like it would be nice if colleges would make like more inclusive policies and things like like I have that as a goal. But a lot of them tell me like it was one professor who was like you can. It was a different physicist that told me this story, but it was just one professor that was like you can do this, you can be a physicist. A physicist could be you who sat with that student and was like I'm going to make sure you understand everything you want to understand.
Speaker 2:So it didn't take a massive overhaul. I would love to see one eventually and hopefully someday there will be enough of us in enough of those spaces to have some overhauling in a bigger scale way. But sometimes when I feel like I'm moving that beach, I remind myself like it just took one teacher to teach those students to do things differently, that they could be something that maybe was not so obvious at first glance, that they really belonged. And so every time we sort of unlearn and relearn some of these narratives and try to think differently about them, I try to remind myself the teachers that I work with are going out there and they're being that one teacher in some cases for students that really need it, and then it feels like the teaspoon it's not so bad, I'll take it, it's better than nothing. That, I think, is how I continue to feel hopeful, even when times are rough, like I sort of feel like they are today.
Speaker 1:It's such an important reminder, I think, whenever you know when you are feeling alone or isolated or like you know what you're doing isn't working, so to speak, that you know sometimes it is just it's one point of contact with one student it might be a phrase that you said, or you know a story you shared with them that you really don't know how.
Speaker 1:That leaves them thinking about possibilities in their own lives. And I think it does infuse a lot of hope back into the role of teacher. You know that you can, as an individual, make significant impacts on the lives of the people you work with, and I think that there are political moments that make it really easy to lose sight of that. But those sorts of stories, I think, like you shared from your interview with the physicist, it brings us back to that idea that it might just be one conversation, one moment, one story that you share with another person that helps them to believe something differently than maybe what they've been told or what they've been led to believe is possible in their own lives or is possible in their own worlds is possible in their own worlds.
Speaker 2:I hope so. I think so some of the time and, of course, I want better systems and I don't, you know. I want all sorts of things for teachers, for them to to be treated differently, both by society and in their individual spaces, like I don't want anyone to like work themselves to death or anything like that, but I definitely learn over and over again that that it is some small moments that really make a difference. One of the things I spend time writing about my own work is what it's like to be a woman of color and be a professor. I am. It's not sort of literacy related, but I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about that and I have to unlearn a lot of things about. You know, it's like David Foster Wallace says this is water. Do you know this story?
Speaker 2:David Foster Wallace gave a speech at Kenyon college and I know he had issues, but it's a good speech and it starts with this old joke about two gold fishers swimming along and an old goldfish swims by and he says, hey, fellas, how's the water? And then one of the young goldfish just looks at the says hey, fellas, how's the water? And then one of the young goldfish just looks at the other and says what the hell is water? Because, like the stuff around us, the stories around us, the ideas that sort of permeate how we think about the world. I'm not immune to them just because I don't look like everyone else, like I have to unlearn things all the time about whether I belong, that people are going to have sometimes different expectations of me than I might prefer, that there's just so much work to do in that, and I always think, okay, I'm going to write this story about this horrible, embarrassing thing that happened to me and my colleague and I do this work together and I'm so grateful to her for it.
Speaker 2:But then we write an article and we send it out into the world, and then I'm invariably surprised by how many other women and people of color and women of color who write to me and say this happened to me too. Thank you so much for writing it down, thank you so much for talking about how you dealt with it and sort of using the research tools that you know to think it through. And then I'm sort of like now I have this whole community of people that do this work, like we're working on a collection of these kinds of pieces from pairs of other women and I didn't sort of have that as a plan. I'm not one to plan. I didn't have that as a plan going through, but I I get reminded constantly that that that sort of telling the truth, talking about the hard stuff, really matters and that before I know it there's more people doing that than I sort of envisioned going in.
Speaker 1:It's like opening a door or starting, you know, starting a new chapter to a story that maybe hasn't been told yet. So that's really great work. Which leads us, actually very nicely to our last question. Given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?
Speaker 2:I want teachers to hear that in so, so many cases, I think they deserve better and I'm really trying to work on it, I promise. And also I want teachers to know that it takes space and time and resources and being treated like a professional to make a better system. And so every time, you know, somebody buys a new curriculum that's shiny and pretty out of a box and says this is going to solve everything, and teachers are like I just don't have it in me to do this dance again. That I understand that and that I do think we have lots of change to make, and that I'm constantly talking with our administrators about being realistic, about what that change could be and how we would have to structure it in order for people to actually have the time, energy, resources to make change that is meaningful, but that every time I've ever convinced school or a school district or any of that to give people that space and time, I'm constantly blown away with what teachers do and come up with.
Speaker 2:I want teachers to know about projects like this Story Matters, that there are coalitions of people if they feel alone, to reach out to, and maybe it would just be a virtual community and maybe not someone next door, but that it is a way to connect with other people who have those same challenges and are making those same hard choices.
Speaker 2:And I hope teachers know that there are some researchers who are not my favorite who are happy to talk about. You know, teachers have to be better and we got to get rid of the bad ones and all that dumb stuff, but that there are some of us who really want to work together and think about what could work, that everything is dependent on a time and place and a context and a particular group of kids, and that there are people who really want to dig into that sort of specificity and think about the kinds of changes we could make that would matter today with this particular group of students and for our system more broadly, and so I hope they continue to feel hopeful. I'm a little I worry about that a lot, as I see people leaving teaching and fewer people wanting to go into it about what it will mean for us if that continues to happen, and so I'm hoping for brighter days sooner rather than later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think teachers really are the people who make the world go round, and it is sad to see great teachers leave the profession and growing teachers leaving the profession also, you know, kind of as they're just getting started. So I do hope that collectively we can kind of stay the course and keep doing the good work so that kids are able to imagine, you know, the kind of future that they want to see. Thank you so much for sharing your ideas today, thank you for spending some time with me and thank you for your contributions to the field of education.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Dr Christina Dobbs is known for her work in the areas of language development, the argumentative writing of students, disciplinary literacy and professional development for secondary content teachers. Her work has been published in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy Reading Research Quarterly, professional Development in Education English Journal, the Reading Teacher Journal of Language Identity and Education, reading and Writing, an interdisciplinary journal Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices, linguistics and Education, and the Journal of School Leadership. She's the author of several books, including Investigating Disciplinary Literacy and Disciplinary Literacy, inquiry and Instruction, a second edition of which will be released in spring of 2024. Christine also frequently reviews literature for the Horn Book and provides professional development talks and workshops for practitioners. She is currently a co-editor of the Journal of Literacy Research. She is a former high school teacher in Houston, texas, as well as a literacy coach and reading specialist. Dr Christina Dobbs is an assistant professor and director of the English Education for Equity and Justice program at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development.
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