Muted Voices: High School Teachers, Composition, And The College Imperative

Muted Voices: High School Teachers, Composition, And The College Imperative

High school teachers have been largely trapped in approaches to literature and composition that are vestiges of approaches that have since been reconsidered––though certainly not entirely abandoned––by those in college.

Most high school teachers remain committed and allegiant to a formalist approach to the teaching of literature with occasional nods to what Kathleen McCormick names expressivist (reader response) approaches to literature, though, as Applebee discovered in his survey of high school literature instruction, such nods are primarily employed only as a preliminary means of generating student interest or as a segue to journal responses rather than as a means toward genuine textual interpretation (Literature).

“Recently, as I’ve heard more from students who have gone on to college, I’ve come to realize that my own college experience is not reflective of the experience most of my students are likely to have. I feel like I need to keep this in mind when I’m tempted to justify my instructional strategies this way.”

High school English teachers are less prone to disciplinary reappraisal and reconstruction. College English studies continues to push the borders of its disciplinary lines of inquiry, but the high school English teacher realizes what the teacher of first-year college comp also realizes: the vast majority of one’s students will not become English majors.

BIG PICTURE: My purposes in exploring teacher perceptions of the tacit college imperative they have assumed is motivated by my concern that we do our colleagues in the schools a disservice by not including them more fully and more frequently in our disciplinary conversations.

No teacher preparation program can adequately address everything prospective teachers should know before they enter the classroom, but since much of the daily work of high school teachers is influenced by the prospect of college English, English education programs should provide their students with at least a sense of what actually occurs in the English department’s freshman writing program. College writing programs do themselves, local high school teachers, and incoming students a disservice by not inviting both prospective and current classroom teachers into their programs to participate in collaborative conversations about the objectives of their programs and their expectations for the students who enroll. Articulating a curricular sequence between the schools and the colleges is not likely to occur, and may not even be entirely desirable, but clarifying for high school teachers the kinds of work assigned and skills engaged in the first-year course can occur with modest investments in time and energy by all those involved.