Juanita was in her fifth year of teaching when I visited her second grade classroom. As a teenager, she immigrated to the U.S. from Guanajuato, México, and came to the university about six years later after having graduated from a local high school. Juanita had been teaching in the same school since earning her credential. At the time I visited her classroom, she had nineteen students, all of whom were from Mexican backgrounds. Some were born in México, others in the U.S. Juanita explained that, “All of my kids’ parents work either in the agricultural fields or in packing companies” (February 10, 2004). Since all had Spanish as their primary language, and their parents requested a bilingual program, Juanita taught in Spanish for at least half of the day.
I was intrigued by Juanita’s work because by her fourth year of teaching, her second graders were creating books using the computer. The previous year, the class had produced five books, each of which included a paper written by every student. The five papers included a biography, an interview, an autobiography, a research paper about a non-fiction topic of student choice, and a fiction story. Students used Microsoft Word, augmenting text with pictures (such as scanned photos or clip part) and other decorative touches (such as Word Art). They also did Internet research. For example, for the book featuring biographies, each child chose a person to research on the Internet, wrote a page about the person’s life, and inserted a downloaded photo of the person. Most of the people they chose were pop stars, such as Selena; but students also chose to write about such past and current people as Presidents, sport stars, and inventors. Each book had a table of contents, was bound with a decorated cover, and had a pocket with a library card so children could check them out. Juanita explained that each child checked out each book to take home for a couple of days.
This year, the class was in the process of producing six books (one per theme of the language arts curriculum), and Juanita would also help each child compile a personal book based on her or his own writings, which each child was saving on her or his own disk. She explained that,
I want all kids to be exposed to technology. . . .Many of my kids don’t have that opportunity. Many of them live in a one-bedroom apartment, with 7, 8 different members, and they don’t have a chance to use a computer. That’s not to say none of my kids do. But the majority don’t. Or don’t get a chance to go to the library and use it. So I want them to be exposed to publishing. (February 10, 2004)Juanita started teaching the children to produce books when she realized that too much of the standard instructional program was boring. “I enjoy teaching but I didn’t find it fun. I did not find anything fun about it, it was all about paper and pencil, paper and pencil, and I knew the kids were getting bored. I was getting bored myself, because I’m used to more interactive and engaging activities” (February 10, 2004). She also reflected on her own experience as a learner. She had become “really hooked on computers in high school,” partly because they helped her learn English. She stuck with computers through the university, and became very skilled at using them. In the university, she also came to see herself as an author. In several of her university courses, books were created with student writings. Juanita said that after graduation when she was cleaning out her materials, she threw away her papers but kept the student-written books. “I would be thinking about college and those years, and I would go pull that book and read it, and I’d think, Oh my god, I remember this class, I remember what book we read” (February 10, 2004).
When she had learned to use computers, and when she learned to produce knowledge and write for an audience that would read what she wrote, she had been both engaged and empowered. As a teacher, she realized that she could, in turn, empower her students in the same way:
We’re expecting students to get power in college. College doesn’t ? college gives you power, but you must bring it with you, from when you’re little. That’s when I realized, wait a minute! . . . I need to teach my students to be creative people, responsible citizens, independent thinkers, people who speak their minds, all of those things. I need to teach my little ones all of that and more. (February 10, 2004)It took some experimentation and persistence to learn to teach her second graders to create documents on computers. She told me that at first the experience was chaotic. Her classroom had a computer station where small groups of students worked while she instructed other small groups on reading, but after a few minutes the students on computers were “all over the place.” Only a few were getting their work done; the majority were not. Sometimes teachers give up at this point, but the next year Juanita decided to try systematically teaching computer use from the beginning of the school year.
And so now we go to the computer lab for 30 minutes, twice a week. . . . I train them all, all of them at once, how to use it, play a little bit with them, show them some computer games first, we start easy, we start playing with the computer, and playing games, then we go to Microsoft Word. Then we use the Internet, then we use scanning, then we download, we do research. (February 10, 2004)She kept the computer station in her classroom and developed learning stations for reading/language arts. But she now teaches children how to help each other: “I train kids, like I may teach one child how to do one thing, so if another child comes to the same question, I direct that child to the other student so that I don’t have to repeat myself two, three, four, five times.” This has helped the children learn independence and peer-tutoring, and has enabled Juanita to focus on small group reading instruction without constant interruptions. When I visited her classroom, this process was working very smoothly.
Through her whole curriculum, Juanita explained that she uses the grade-level standards as a guide, but expects and teaches more than they require:
I expect more than what’s in the curriculum. Therefore I give them more. For example our curriculum expects for them to be able to multiply timetables twos, threes, fours and fives. That’s all. When they finish [my] second grade [class], they know how to multiply times six and all the way up to eleven and twelve. And they have to be able to divide with remainders. Remainders! A remainder is a third grade curriculum. But I expect them to do it. . . . The standards say for second graders to be able to write a paragraph or two paragraphs. But why not three paragraphs? Or why not four or five at the end of the year? (February 10, 2004)In order to teach beyond the expected curriculum, Juanita carefully studies the standards and adopted texts, and figures out what is key and what she can skip. A combination of experience, staff development, and cues in the text has helped her identify which standards to attend to. She also keeps an eye on what demands of college-level work look like. She commented that, “If you were to cover every standard, you would be 70 years old by the time you finished with all of them. It’s too much, so I pick key standards for math, key standards for language arts.” Being selective and knowing where to focus has enabled her to teach more deeply to higher levels than if she tried to cover everything.
Juanita also tries to make the content as multicultural as she can, given limitations of available resources. She explained that the students enjoy learning about other cultures, and they also enjoy Aztec dance when she has taught it; these further stimulate their engagement. Not only are her students intellectually engaged, but their measured skills are improving:
I’ve seen students improve in their reading, and I can see from the day they come in. Just to compare, this year out of 19 students I had 14 below benchmark, two above benchmark and the rest of them, average. And right now I have 5 below benchmark, only 5 out of 14. I had 2 kids above benchmark, right now I have 7 above. I’m really pleased with their work, because kids are reading 100 words per minute. And in English they’re reading close to ninety and a hundred, they’re really close to that, in English and Spanish you can see both languages pulling up, and I like that. (February 10, 2004)From C. Sleeter, 2005. Un-Standardizing Curriculum, Teachers College Press.