Kristen Pastore-Capuana is an assistant professor of English at Buffalo State College, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate English education courses. She is also the co-coordinator of field experiences and community partnerships. A former high school English teacher in Western New York, Dr. Pastore-Capuana’s fourteen years of secondary experience inform her work as a researcher and teacher educator. She is committed to working for and alongside students and teachers in this region and believes the innovative work in Western New York classrooms can serve as a model of critical inquiry in middle and high school ELA. Her research interests include critical literacy practices in English language arts, secondary English language arts teacher development, and teacher agency. Most recently, she co-edited a collection (with Terri Rodriguez and Heidi Hallman) exploring the experiences and relationships between in-service teachers and teacher educators in Invested Stayers: How Teachers Thrive in Challenging Times (Roman and Littlefield, 2020). She can be contacted at pastorka@buffalostate.edu.
Exploring the Places We Thought We Knew: Inquiry-Based English Language Arts Curriculum Rooted in Community Stories, Histories, and Art
Moments of Tension as a Place for Growth
Moment 1:
After sitting at my computer on what felt like the 100th day of teaching from home, I got in my car. I needed to get out of the four walls I had been in, surrounded by the rectangles of my Zoom screen and the eerie solitude of my house. I missed the feeling of my office with the door open, my Buffalo State colleagues and students making me think so deeply from even the smallest moments of passing conversation. I missed the organic nature of in-person connection. I turned my Spotify on and Big Thief’s song “Masterpiece” was playing:
“You whisper to a restless ear, ‘Can you get me out of here?”
Adrianne Lenker’s voice stuck a cord in me, and I felt in my soul that I needed some change in the spaces that I was occupying. I wanted to feel inspired, and I wanted to create and connect in ways that transcended the physical boundaries of pandemic living and teaching.
Moment 2:
It was the first night of the spring 2021 semester, and my Methods class was coming to a close. Prior to class starting, my students read Giroux’s (1985) “Teachers as Transformative Intellectuals.” I have taught ENG 463: Methods, Materials, and Professional Development of English Language Arts Teachers for the last four years, and I feel a tension with balancing the larger theoretical and philosophical aspects of teaching with the very real, practical questions of my students regarding lesson planning, critical inquiry-based unit planning, and designing meaningful literacy experiences for students that honor students’ languages, literacies, identities, and lived experiences.
Both the theoretical and the practical are pieces of the connective tissue that makes up our teaching practice, but the two are often positioned in opposition. As the class was about to end, one teacher candidate shared a profound question, “What if I don’t know enough texts that will matter to kids or matter in our community?”
Reclaiming What It Means to be “Well-Read”
The question posed was out of true concern and my other students nodded their heads in agreement. The feeling of pressure that English teachers need to be “well-read” is something my teacher candidates often share, and we work hard to de-center the text and question the notion of anyone being an expert of a text. Additionally, we interrogate what being “well-read” means in educational and personal spaces—- how it often continues reliance on the canon and perpetuates a problematic hierarchy of authors and texts, one that limits which voices matter. Disrupting and discussing “social capital” (Bordieu,1984) and our decisions of what to include in our classroom spaces is a critical piece of our planning conversations.
I was so struck by my teacher candidate’s question about texts that speak to our community and how we need to consider and represent the lived experiences and talent of our local worlds in the English classroom. This question is rooted in the deep intellectual work that is a part of teaching and reiterates the lesson that every decision we make about who to include or not include in our curriculum is a political act. This question was key in shifting conversations about texts from being what we believed students “should read” to what texts speak to the lived experiences of our students and are in service to the action we hope to create in our classrooms.
My methods class took up this call and decided that we should explore and amass local literature and texts that we love while also spending time in our field placements talking to students about the literature, pop culture, and texts that speak to them in real ways and reflect the youth cultures of our community.
We decided that we would create a growing document, or what I nicknamed, “The Western New York Syllabus,” of texts, art, and creations rooted in Western New York experiences and stories. My students and I all had stories of the ways in which our community, or Buffalo in general, was misread and mislabeled by people or the media. We sought to reclaim and center the stories, artists, and experiences of our city through both the reading experience and inquiry-based instructional planning.
The Ongoing Construction of the Western New York Syllabus
Inspired by the incredible work of #StandingRockSyllabus and The Lemonade Syllabus: A Collection of Works Celebrating Black Womanhood, my class is now working on the creation of some guiding questions for this project:
- How can we celebrate, elevate, and explore writers and artists from our own community?
- What are the stories being told about Western New York by Western New Yorkers? How do they counter narratives circulating about our community?
- In what ways have many people and their stories been silenced, misrepresented, and maligned in our community? How do we work to rectify this history of racism, bigotry, and discrimination?
- What are the ways teachers and students can shape the stories, discussions, and social action in our local communities?
- What are the challenges and struggles facing Western New Yorkers? How can we better understand these experiences and support one another in meaningful ways?
Instead of having the WNY Syllabus be a random list of writers and artists, we thought creating the inquiry questions helped to center our work. We decided to use these questions to guide our research, and we are pulling local-created poems, historical pieces, stories, non-fiction articles, podcasts, music, and art that connects to our core inquiry questions.
As a methods instructor, I plan many experiences to help explore and understand inquiry-based learning in English language arts. We read Teaching Literature for Adolescents (Beach, Appleman, Fecho, Simon, 2016) and spend time working with inquiry frameworks for instructional design while also hearing from local teacher leaders who plan critical inquiry literacy learning in middle and high school ELA classrooms.
Creating our own inquiry questions is a helpful model for teacher candidates, and it facilitates a powerful “Now What?” at the heart of our work. How do we build meaningful literacy experiences rooted in these questions? How do we scaffold powerful content creation that will help students be writers and thinkers positioned alongside the writers and thinkers we noted in our public domains? It isn’t enough to pull works that reflect our community; we need to think about what to do with it all.
Although this was not an intended part of my course, this has become part of the ongoing work we are doing. It serves as a model for the constant work we do as teachers to read our worlds and connect our classrooms to the spaces and histories we are rooted within.
Creating Rich Textual Environments Connected Through Community Inquiry
Over the pandemic, I had the opportunity to meet friends outside for a tour of Buffalo’s incredible murals. Buffalo has a vibrant, ever-evolving mural scene and many of the pieces of art take up themes of identity, culture, justice, and our region’s history. We decided that the murals across our city were invitations to discuss deeper ideas and questions while situating themselves specifically in a real context, our own neighborhoods.
One of the powerful mural experiences was our tour of The Freedom Wall, a mural by Buffalo born artists John Baker, Julia Bottoms, Chuck Tingley, and Edreys Wajed. I shared this mural with my class, and we discussed how it speaks to our work with Marjane Sartrapi’s Persepolis, one of the books we were reading in Methods, and the ways people have fought hard for justice across time and place. We also discussed the work of poet Lucille Clifton, who grew up in Buffalo, and how we must include her poetry–especially “won’t you celebrate with me.” Again, we returned to our work in class with Sartrapi’s graphic novel and Marji’s defiance to survive adolescence and repressive powers around her.
In previous semester discussions, we often return to the Rust Belt identity of our community and one teacher candidate noted that we should include the work of Milton Rogovin, a Brooklyn-born photographer who later lived and worked in Buffalo, in our inquiry planning. Rogovin is noted for his prolific photographs of Buffalo’s Lower West Side, and we thought about the possibility of a portrait project. In fact, I was inspired so much by this discussion that I plan to ask each current teacher candidate to take a self-portrait to share with their teaching philosophy statements. The dialogue around community creates a fertile space for reenvisioning the work I continue to do in my course while modeling how teachers can adjust and change during the inquiry process.
As noted above, our focus on the texts from our community did not remain in a vacuum nor did they just reflect the Western New York region. Our collaboration led to rich discussions about our community, but it also helped us draw connections to other pieces. Teachers are artists who mix, remix, and pair texts to create opportunities to explore big questions and ideas. It is my hope that our ongoing work will serve as a tangible answer to the question posed to me earlier, “What if I don’t know enough texts that will matter to kids or matter in our community?”
The Power of Inquiry Pairings
The final piece of this work is to shift to the action portion of working with these powerful pieces. In a recent assignment, I asked teacher candidates to pair one of our local pieces with another text through an inquiry framework. Teacher candidates were not only thinking about the pairing of texts, but they were asked to design lessons to engage adolescent learners with working with these texts together, culminating in some kind of student content creation.
I wanted my methods students to have the experience of pairing pieces together to explore deeper inquiry questions and then design a way for their own students to create a piece that participates in this larger community dialogue. Teacher candidates aligned these lessons with Next Generation Standards, but situated them in the lived experiences of their future students.
As a former high school English teacher and now teacher educator, I often say, “Sometimes we just need to get out of the way.” My students, past and present, always amaze me with their creativity and innovation. For example, one teacher candidate is designing lessons that pair Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me” with Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb.” Her work involves reader response writing and analysis followed by students creating new poems using a Black Out poetry model based on the two anchor texts. The lesson explored the struggles and challenges exacerbated by the pandemic in WNY, unfairly impacting marginalized communities most, and asked students to consider how we can use this moment to create change. We do not live in a utopia, and one teacher candidate reminded us that “we have a responsibility to represent the realities of life here.”
Sharing Our Work at Youth Voices Conference
Situating our inquiry in the local provides powerful bridges to connect with other places and people without minimizing what makes us unique, complex people. We must create spaces to discuss and confront the problematic inequities and divisions across our region by first listening to the people that live here. I am hopeful that engaging middle and high schoolers in this work will enable all of us to be honest about the realities of this region and address the deep challenges we face.
At the end of every academic year, our English education program holds a Youth Voices Conference to showcase the innovative work that English teachers and their students do during the school year. I hope teacher candidates will be able to continue this work alongside their students in their fall student teaching placements, leading to the creation of their own critical compositions to share at our 2022 conference. Perhaps one day our conference will expand to become a meeting place for classrooms both in and outside Western New York. Until then, I encourage everyone to come check out Buffalo—it’s so much more than what you may think.
Beach, R., Appleman, D., Hynds, S., & Wilhelm, J. (2016). Teaching literature to adolescents 3rd edition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Harvard University Press.
Giroux, Henry A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals : toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Bergin & Garvey.
National Poetry Month
Join Ethical ELA in celebrating National Poetry Month