Dr.

Sarah Hobson

Teacher Narrative

Introduction to Courses

I have taught a variety of courses over my four years at SUNY Cortland. Over the course of
4 + years, I have taught every professional block class in the AED undergraduate major,
except for AED 341. In all, I have had 8 new course preps.

I have taught most of the undergraduate AED classes and three of the graduate AED
courses. I have also worked closely with host teachers to supervise student teachers in the
field, and I have organized a one credit seminar through which I guide student teachers in
navigating the challenges of a written exam instituted by the state, the EdTPA. With this
exam, students are required to present to Pearson an in-depth analysis of the school and
students (cultures, identities, interests, learning needs) whom they are teaching. They
provide further analysis of their planning, implementation, and assessment processes for
one unit of their teaching. They include lesson plans, instructional materials, assessments,
evaluation criteria, video recordings of their teaching, samples of student writing, and 3
samples of their assessment of student writing.

Through courses the variety of courses that permit me to walk closely with students across
their professional block and into the field, I have gained an in-depth knowledge of the
program content as a whole and the necessary distribution of content across each of the
classes and semesters of the professional block.

I have been particularly delighted to take on the challenges of teaching in a new field of
education for me, that of technology and education. While my learning curve has been
steep, I have loved every minute of learning about how to integrate technologies into even
more power packed pedagogies that align with the literacies, questions, passions, and
identities of adolescents.

Additionally, the opportunity to teach an English literature course, Multicultural literature
was a delight. In this class, I found a place for deeper explorations with AEN, English, and
other majors of the constructions of race and ethnicity within American history, literature,
and psychology. I had the opportunity to integrate my ongoing teacher research into the
possibilities for multimodal (visual, artistic, embodied, printbased) and interactive modes
of learning to inspire productive cross-cultural conversation. These inquiries were in the
service of collaborative deconstruction of the connections among texts, historical and
contemporary contexts, relations of power and privilege, and social movements.

Dr. Sarah Hobson

Teacher Narrative: Frameworks

In this narrative, you will read how within each of my courses I situate students as
researchers of the relationships between texts, cultural contexts and practices, and various
personal and group identities.

Here, I delineate my teaching frameworks, explaining what I bring and how I have built
upon and helped shape the AEN program over the past four and a half years.

We are in a time of educational reform centered in the hope of addressing gross
inequalities in society through a process that often leads to the labeling of historically
under resourced schools in particular and teachers as failures. Documented time and again
by history, urban planning, and literacy scholars is the impact on all students, and in
particular on poor and working class white students and students of color of a nation that
justifies segregating people and resources. Indeed, from the ending of slavery until today,
across the nation, the legacy of separate but equal prevails in America's schools. Policies
and practices that have entrenched these inequities include federal housing authority
incentives to move white people and their businesses out of cities and into suburbs, racial
covenants, and realtor and neighborhood association redlining that continues to sequester
people of color and working class white people into certain impoverished and controlled
sections of cities.

Literacy scholars understand the movements in the academy and in federal and state
governments to counter this history (following Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954) by
federally funding Title I schools with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.
In order to hold Title I schools accountable, the federal government also instituted
standardized tests. The government concluded that as long as students could pass these
tests, under resourced students would be able to overcome years of racial zoning, white
flight, and depleted city budgets to gain equal access to society.

This belief in a one size fits all education system has been re-instated under current
educational reforms. With the refunding of Title I schools in 2001 under No Child Left
Behind came the return of, this time, higher stakes standardized tests. In exchange for
funding, a majority of students in all subgroups (race, class, gender, special education,
ethnicity, etc.) need to demonstrate proficiency on state tests. Additionally, schools must
demonstrate Annual Yearly Progress within three years of being labeled under performing,
or the state takes them over, and students receive a voucher permitting them to transfer to
non-failing schools in their school districts.

Accompanying this shift in policy, Bill Gates and other corporate and non-profit
organizations joined together to advocate the further standardization of education through
the Common Core State Standards. In order to entice states to adopt these standards, in
2010, Obama's administration created an incentive known as Race to the Top. Under Race
to the Top, state consortia compete to locate testing companies that can design
assessments that align with the Common Core.

Dr. Sarah Hobson

While there are many positives to these reforms, especially the acute attention on
subgroups of students in need of additional assistance, there is a fundamental orientation
towards literacy that accompanies the new reforms that often works against potentially
good intentions.

In the 1980's, New Literacy Scholars had a breakthrough that has transformed the
educational arena. Led by Brian Street (1984) and Shirley Brice Heath (1983), New
Literacy Scholars came to realize that there is no such thing as literate or illiterate. Instead,
each of us are a part of multiple cultures and language practices. We speak and write in
formal and informal multiple languages. The contexts in which we communicate shape the
language practices we use. In other words, literacy includes the culturally accepted
practices and relations of power that influence the ways we use language. The ways we use
language in turn shape the identities we enact in any given context. Literacies are the social
and cultural and political practices that we enact through language.

Because of these cultural, political, and social understandings of literacy, New Literacy
Scholars no longer view literacy simply as the ability to read and write. Instead, they view
literacy as the ability to integrate the right kinds of social and cultural practices with
language for specific contexts (Barton et al., 2000). In other words, literacy is the ability to
perform one's interpretation of texts in written or spoken form in order to accomplish
social, cultural, and political purposes. Indeed, each configuration of people and places
influences the language practices and identities we enact and vice versa--each person uses
language and cultural practices to influence any given configuration of people and places
(Rymes, 2009).

The result of this breakthrough in literacy is the understanding that children come from
multiple cultures and language practices that derive from many different kinds of texts. In
fact, given the history of segregation and inequality in America, they also come from many
different experiences with inequity.

About the time that New Literacy Scholars were discovering these breakthroughs in
literacy, critical literacy scholarship was taking root in Brazil through the efforts of
liberation theology, led by Paulo Freire (1970). As part of the effortfirst, to justify the
genocide of Native Americans, the slavery of African Americans, and the servitude of
working class white, Hispanic, and Asian people, and second, to justify the segregation of
these races, ethnicities, and classes, many in American institutions (academic, media, and
medical) worked together to recreate a separate narrative of inferiority for each group.
Film producers, news reporters, doctors, and anthropologists created narratives that
blamed people of color or impoverished whites for their status in life.

Critical literacy scholars understood that the powerful used literacytheir packaging of
language, their representations of rich and poorto ensure their own power. They also
understood the ways the powerful denied access to literacy for racial and ethnic subgroups.
If only the language practices of the wealthy elite mattered and were tested, then anyone
who could not master the Master's language could be considered illiterate and deficient.

Dr. Sarah Hobson

New Literacy Scholars and Critical Literacy scholars have worked together to counter years
of discrimination against subgroups of students not by further standardizing literacy and
language instruction and expecting students to master the Master's tests. Instead, they
have worked to invite students to share their cultural practices with language, to study
how language works in different texts and contexts, and to acquire proficiency and agency
in many different language practices. They invite students to interrogate who is privileged
by representations and enactments of relationships. They position educators and students
to interrogate the ways that language and literacy practices in and outside of classrooms
work to privilege, exclude, oppress, deny, and/or free.

I support standards and high expectations. I also support strong, intellectually rich,
linguistically diverse, and culturally relevant assignments and assessments. My
expectations align with engaging youth as critically savvy researchers of the implications of
language practices for them and for others. Thus, I also engage pre-service teachers as
critically savvy researchers of the relationships between literacy frameworks and youth
identities, between choices of texts and youth identities, and between rhetorical and
interactional practices and youth identities. I work to model instructional designs that
build on the cultural and linguistic knowledge and expertise of students.

In line with years of research into a particularly powerful genre of literature and research,
ethnodrama, I engage pre-service teachers in surfacing their own multiple perspectives
while reading texts that draw from multiple perspectives. I invite them to read for the
biases of writers in their choices of representations for people and cultural practices. I ask
students to research the historical and cultural contexts that inform the language choices
and biases of speakers and writers. I ask students to examine the implications of any given
perspective for various audiences. I ask students to learn many different language practices
and to explore many genres and sub-genres of writing and how they contribute to the
knowledge and beliefs of writers and communities.

I am preparing youth and educators for a global world. I know that the most relevant,
motivating, and empowering instruction engages student experiences with cultures, their
language practices, and their emerging identities.

Across my portfolio, you will see me reflect on a variety of syllabi and instructional designs
that facilitate pre-service teachers' abilities to understand the power of teaching in a
variety of modes (visual, aural, interactive, musical, artistic) that help surface the identities
and languages of youth from a diverse array of backgrounds. These designs draw on
drama, visual literacies, multimodal presentations (power point and prezi), and digital
technologies. These designs engage future teachers in establishing themselves as capable
and valid researchers of texts, language practices, and real world issues. These designs
position pre-service teachers to reflect on their own educational autobiographies as they
delineate the many different literacy frameworks that have shaped their cultures,
languages, and identities.

Through autobiographical reflection, pre-service teachers secure a foundation of integrated

Dr. Sarah Hobson

literacy frameworks (literacy as skill, literacy as school knowledge, literacy as social and
cultural construct, critical literacy) on behalf of maximizing the growth of youth as readers,
writers, and researchers. My goal is to prepare teachers who understand how to advocate
for youth through their choice of literacy frameworks and instructional designs. My goal is
for youth to have more agency, more ownership of their own learning, more passion as
they hear the power in their own story as it connects with the stories of their peers and of
writers. Together, their stories reveal much about the influence of the past on their present
identities. My hope is that students will learn how to use their collective stories and
language practices to re-design both the present and the future of both America and the
world.